The description for We Feel Fine reads “An Exploration of Human Emotions in Six Movements”. Searching for more clarity, you click on the “mission” link. You read:
“We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale. 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.
We Feel Fine - sample - click to see full size
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.
And then you click on the link that says “Open We Feel Fine” and you find yourself in a field of moving, multi-colored dots. You point, you click, you read, you point somewhere else. And you discover feelings – all kinds of feelings. And the dots move around. And it’s very cool. And then you look at the menu on the bottom left of the page, and you click on something else, and behold, more coolness. And you interact. And you play around. And though you don’t really understand anything, you get a feeling for what this is all about. Which turns out to be exactly what this is all about. Feeling.