We Feel Fine’s system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence. Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties - color, size, shape, opacity —indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds. While data visualization or infographics has been defined as a tool to expose patterns in data and amplify its cognition, We Feel Fine reveals its affective aspects by linking it with intimate human emotions, whilst the database in whole composes a constantly updated collective narrative.
