Friday, December 19, 2014

We Feel Fine: Visualizing Emotions?

The web has given us many opportunities to look at our world and ourselves in new ways. With social networks and other media, we have tools to share how we are feeling 24/7. One research group has attempted to capture that zeitgeist in an interactive data visualization project.

We Feel Fine allows you to look at data about our emotions. Clusters form around keywords and demographic information. The site is playful: you can mouse over the opening screen dots to see what words have been used. Selecting Murmurs will load individual status descriptions onto the screen. The section labelled Mounds is actually a chart with jello-like mounds representing how many people have used a particular word to describe their state of mind.

While the site has a playful feel, the implications are deep. Does this really represent our emotional lives? What should we do with these insights? There is something tremendous and unprecedented in this project even if it is limited. In some ways it validates our depths. There is more to us than just the surface. It shows us how little we can know without someone being willing to share. When you see that thousands of individuals have used the keyword crying to describe their state, it tells us something. We feel better when we see that the keyword most used is better.

It is a site worth checking out. With 10 years of data, they add thousands of new emotion descriptions every day.