- ISBN13: 9781439116838
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
In this dazzling exploration of contemporary human feelings, digital whiz kids Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris use their computer programs to peer into the inner lives of millions, constructing a vast and deep portrait of our collective emotional landscape. Armed with custom software that scours the English-speaking world’s new Internet blog posts every minute, hunting down the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling,” the authors have collected over 12 million feelings s… More >>
We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion
I reviewed We Feel Fine for furtherfield.org here – [...]
It’s a great book that I recommend to anyone interested in art, design, social media or cyberculture. Here’s an exert from that review –
Dictionary definitions, statistical breakdowns of the kinds of words, ages and genders of bloggers and other demographic and affective data are presented in compact graphic form on every page, and larger charts show more general conclusions. Feelings, or the words used to refer to them, are shown to vary between genders and as people age. This is an exemplary application of Edward Tufte’s science of the graphical presentation of information. They even have sparklines. But that science is applied to data that is at its heart qualitative rather than quantitative.
Such “data visualization” was a hot trend in 2009. Visualisations of crime rates, corruption, climate change and other issues can be produced using such data, and have become an important weapon in the arsenal of visual persuasion. On the We Feel Fine web site, feeling data is mapped to coloured blobs in an interactive user interface to the constantly updated (every minute) database. In the book, feelings and demographic information are processed to produce graphics that represent the prevalence of feelings over time, between genders, in different locations and in relation to each other. But as visual persuasion this is directed back to the vividness of human, qualitative experience rather than a more political or economic agenda.
“Sentiment analysis” was also hot trend in social media marketing in 2009 and its limitations quickly became apparent. Current systems simply cannot handle irony, sarcasm, regional differences in the usage of words and in many cases even simple negation. The We Feel Fine system is an exercise in gathering affective or sentiment data to visualise, but it avoids the pitfalls of sentiment analysis by automating only the gathering of the statements of emotion themselves, not analysis of how they relate to what they refer to. This is a classic example of well-chosen limits strengthening a project.
The problem of the relationship between qualitative (how you feel) and quantitative (how many people feel what you feel) data and how to deal with this in a non-voodoo way are avoided in We Feel Fine because of this.
Another 2009 hot trend was “big data”, the assembling of datasets that vary from many megabytes to many gigabytes in size. Datasets from regional and national governments, scientific research and freedom of information requests can be used in “data mining” to search for facts among the numbers. The We Feel Fine system is a good example of a big data dataset (and API, application programming interface, for accessing that data over the web). Unlike global temperature data it neither offers the possibility of objective accuracy nor involves any great risk if it lacks it. But it does reintroduce the human subjectivity that big data threatens to replace with numbers.
The striking thing about this is that although the We Feel Fine book is very much of the zeitgeist for 2009 the web-based system it presents started five years ago in 2005. At that time blogs were regarded by the mass media as disposable, narcissistic and somehow inauthentic. They were an unlikely subject at that time for art concerned with the authentic expression of emotion. We Feel Fine’s history, subject and results therefore both prefigure and go beyond the current state of the art in Internet social and corporate culture.
Rating: 5 / 5
This reader was charmed, excited and inspired by this book. “We Feel Fine” operates on several levels. Physically, it has the heft and graphic quality of a medium sized, high-end coffee table book. Its content delights with the immediate impact of the really cool photos of people and things. The excellence of the pictures surprised me given that they are pulled from the blogs together with the text which expresses the “feeling” of the title.
This sixty-something guy was particularly impressed with the insight into the minds of those who tend to be a bit younger than I. It has certainly proved to be a point of contact for provocative discussions with my children who are of the generation that provides most of the substance of the “we” who “feel fine”. In that sense it is revelatory and hopeful that “the kids are alright”. You see this both through the unique individuals and the information that is extrapolated from so many of us. Finally, it may well draw you into the website of the same name which minute to minute provides data for what may well be a sequel in the making of this “Almanac of Human Emotion”.
Rating: 5 / 5
“We Feel Fine” is a collection of quotes and photos from blogs from all over the English world. All of these quotes were garnered from sentences that began “I feel.” As the writers state, “Drawing from a database of more than 12 million human feelings collected over 3 years from personal blogs on the Internet, ‘We Feel Fine’ presents a comprehensive contemporary portrait of the world’s emotional landscape, exploring the ups and downs of everyday life in all its color, chaos, and candor.” The book is arranged as a coffee table book. One can simply pick it up, open to a page and view the beautiful photos and quotes. The authors have created different sections based on gender, specific emotions, locations, weather and topics. For those interested in more detail, the authors have provided statistical analysis of the data they have mined as well as the computer code that they used to obtain the data.
I really enjoyed the time I spent flipping through and reading this book. I didn’t know what to expect and it was a pleasant surprise. I especially liked this “life sentence” that they included toward the end of the book, summing up “major emotional themes as we age.”: “We start simple (11-14), but soon fill up with angst (15-18) and feelings of confinement (19-22), until we leave those behind to go conquer the world (23-26), before gradually trading ambition for balance (27-30), developing an appreciation for our bodies (31-35) and our children (31-35), and evolving a sense of connectedness (36-40), for which we feel grateful (36-40), then happy (41-49), calm (41-49), and finally blessed (50+).”
Rating: 5 / 5
Having been a fan of the We Feel Fine website for some time, I have to admit that I was skeptical about how well it could translate to print. So much of what I loved about the website was its interactivity, and that’s obviously not something that can be preserved in a print format (yet). Part of me also wondered if the premise itself – surveying and analyzing the blogosphere to extract meta-observations about emotion – would seem as interesting when extracted from its natural environment (the Internet).
I’m happy to say that this book shattered my fears about it! It’s a pretty thorough compendium of human feelings, with enough interesting facts and figures in it to piece together a college anthropology thesis, but it also has the stunningly beautiful presentation of a high-class coffee table book (eye candy AND brain candy! How about that?) I particularly love the extra pages at the back that highlight an assortment of other interesting observations, such as the correlation between certain emotions and certain world events. The authors pulled things from the data that I never would have considered, leading me into some really surprising trains of thought.
I highly recommend this book, especially if you’re a design nerd like me!
Rating: 5 / 5
Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris are the new curators of the human condition. In the era of online media where everything is immediate and granular, Kamvar & Harris created a smart way to roll up what everyone is feeling. They do it in a way that gives us a window into our collective zeitgeist. It is a Twitter stream for the human race, and one that has the aesthetics and sensibility of an artist.
Rating: 5 / 5