Gosdot

Yesterday when I mentioned Data Visualization tools, I was thinking of tools that you and I could use to enhance our vistors experience without coding anything. Today I have to point out the work of Jonathan Harris who’s visualization projects are nothing short of spectacular. His projects “Universe” and “Love Lines” are impressive but other projects like “We Feel Fine” and “Phylotaxis” are amazing achievements both visually and in functionality!

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 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.

Definitely check out his work at number27.org, if there are super artists in the coding/visualization world, he’s more like number ‘23′!

Note: An even more comprehensive list of data vis projects can be found here.