Information Tracking Aesthetically

A project by Jonathan Harrison and Sep Kamvar, called “We Feel Fine,” is tracking infobytes across the web in real time. Information aesthetics describes “We Feel Fine” in this way

an impressive collection of beautiful data visualizations that depict human feelings & moods harvested from a large number of weblogs. a system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” & “I am feeling”, records the full sentence & identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.).

Take look for yourself at the wealth of human data that Mr. Harrison and Mr. Kamvar are collecting and organizing into what they call “An Exploration of Human Emotion in Six Movements.”

How many ways might you use this information to get closer to the folks who are important to you?

Liz Strauss