viz.

Image Credit: We Feel Fine

H/T: Stephanie Rosen

I spent an inordinate amount of time today on Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s thought-provoking website, We Feel Fine.  This website scans, or in their words “harvests,” weblogs for statements with the phrase “I feel.”  Each of these statements is then represented as a colorful “particle” and organized into a variety of visual and statistical data.  The website generates fascinating examples of how people communicate about feelings and gives a powerful impression of both the diversity and similarity among affective statements online.  It also raises important questions about privacy.  The statements and images on We Feel Fine are from blogs, MySpace and Flickr.  Harvested statements whose writers’ also posted images are represented as a “Montage” with the text embedded in the image.  Site users can then save and send these postcard-like pieces.  For both its creative design and surveillance techniques, We Feel Fine provokes interesting questions regarding affect, privacy and online writing.

Image Credit: We Feel Fine

One of the amazing, and time-sucking, capacities of this site is the endless combinations of categories that users can search.  With the options to search among 3,428  feelings, numerous locations (countries, states and cities), genders, ages, weather (sunny, cloudy, rainy or snowy) and dates, there are countless possible research queries.  How do women feel in the UK when it’s cloudy?  How do people in New York describe their apathy?  What were people feeling in the US in the months leading up to the 2008 elections? 

I thought it would be interesting, in the context of this website, to see who feels “rhetorical” and how they describe this feeling.  Although there were only 38 people who felt rhetorical since data collection began in 2005, the responses show interesting uses of the word.  While many wrote about feelings towards rhetoric assignments, one of my favorite particles reads, “I feel like throwing some rhetorical grenades.”  The implications of data such as this is not always readily apparent and is clouded by the somewhat eerie concept of "harvesting" feelings, but as a means for exploring a specific phrase like "rhetorical," it is a fascinating resource.