I watched this TED talk by Jonathan Harris few years ago before I started blogging. Now having started blogging et al, I interpret the importance their work. Harris and Sep Kamvar worked together to create this website called We Fell Fine to capture current emotional state of bloggers all around the world by reading their posts. It's fascinating stuff !! Here's an interview with Sep Kamvar:
"COOK: Please describe what We Feel Fine, the website, looks like?
KAMVAR: The We Feel Fine website is an interactive visualization of a continuously updated database of over 13 million expressions of emotion on blogs. The website itself has 6 different movements, each of which is built around a series of colored dots. Each colored dot is the visual representation of a feeling sentence. They are colored based on the feeling and when a user clicks on a dot, the ball explodes and shows the sentence.
COOK: Can you please give an example?
KAMVAR: The opening movement is a playful visualization that we call Madness. In Madness, all the colored dots are swarming around frantically around the screen, and when you click on any one of the dots, it explodes to reveal the feeling sentence behind it. Another movement is called Mobs, where the dots coalesce to make a bar graph to show some basic statistics about the data set, for example, what are the top feelings?
COOK: How does it work?
KAMVAR: The core of We Feel Fine is a crawler that scours the blogosphere every few minutes and scans for the words “I feel” or “I am feeling.” This data comes from a variety of sources, including LiveJournal, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Twitter, and Google.
Once the words “I feel” or “I am feeling” are found, the system looks back to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and stores the full sentence in a database.
Since blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the crawler could use the “profile” section of the blog to get demographic information (age, gender, location) of the blogger who wrote the sentence, and this is stored in the database alongside the feeling.
COOK: When did it first become clear to you that this data might have some scientific value?
KAMVAR: Once we had a million feelings in the database, we realized that this was probably the biggest database of human emotion in existence. It allowed us to do "surveys" of several hundred thousand people in a matter of seconds. We thought that this would be a great tool for hypothesis generation, giving us hypotheses around questions like: Do people feel sadder in the winter? How do men feel differently from women.
COOK: Can you please describe one of the scientific projects that has used this data?
KAMVAR: We did some interesting joint work with Cassie Mogilner at UPenn and Jennifer Aaker at Stanford University. Cassie and Jennifer’s research focuses on happiness, and in this study, we were interested in how people define happiness. We used We Feel Fine and other, more traditional methods, to show that the meaning of happiness changes in very specific ways as people get older."
"COOK: Please describe what We Feel Fine, the website, looks like?
KAMVAR: The We Feel Fine website is an interactive visualization of a continuously updated database of over 13 million expressions of emotion on blogs. The website itself has 6 different movements, each of which is built around a series of colored dots. Each colored dot is the visual representation of a feeling sentence. They are colored based on the feeling and when a user clicks on a dot, the ball explodes and shows the sentence.
COOK: Can you please give an example?
KAMVAR: The opening movement is a playful visualization that we call Madness. In Madness, all the colored dots are swarming around frantically around the screen, and when you click on any one of the dots, it explodes to reveal the feeling sentence behind it. Another movement is called Mobs, where the dots coalesce to make a bar graph to show some basic statistics about the data set, for example, what are the top feelings?
COOK: How does it work?
KAMVAR: The core of We Feel Fine is a crawler that scours the blogosphere every few minutes and scans for the words “I feel” or “I am feeling.” This data comes from a variety of sources, including LiveJournal, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Twitter, and Google.
Once the words “I feel” or “I am feeling” are found, the system looks back to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and stores the full sentence in a database.
Since blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the crawler could use the “profile” section of the blog to get demographic information (age, gender, location) of the blogger who wrote the sentence, and this is stored in the database alongside the feeling.
COOK: When did it first become clear to you that this data might have some scientific value?
KAMVAR: Once we had a million feelings in the database, we realized that this was probably the biggest database of human emotion in existence. It allowed us to do "surveys" of several hundred thousand people in a matter of seconds. We thought that this would be a great tool for hypothesis generation, giving us hypotheses around questions like: Do people feel sadder in the winter? How do men feel differently from women.
COOK: Can you please describe one of the scientific projects that has used this data?
KAMVAR: We did some interesting joint work with Cassie Mogilner at UPenn and Jennifer Aaker at Stanford University. Cassie and Jennifer’s research focuses on happiness, and in this study, we were interested in how people define happiness. We used We Feel Fine and other, more traditional methods, to show that the meaning of happiness changes in very specific ways as people get older."
No comments:
Post a Comment