We+Feel+Fine

An exploration of human emotion in six movements.
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the 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 records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). 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. All of this information is saved. 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. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: [|__Madness__], [|__Murmurs__] , [|__Montage__] , [|__Mobs__] , [|__Metrics__] , and [|__Mounds__].

Analysis:
• We Feel Fine is a great example of organizing a large amount of accessible data. • The information can be browed in more than one specific way. • You can browse information with two main themes, randomly (experimental) or specifically. • A good example of a site where you can go in not knowing what to expect, and be able to find content very easily.