[spectre] We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion.

[marc garrett]

Sorry for any cross posting...



Review by Rob Myers.

We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar
Scribner Book Company, December 2009
ISBN 1439116830

"We Feel Fine - An Almanac Of Human Emotion" is a hardback book that in 
just under 300 pages of well designed montages, data visualisations, 
diagrams, illustrations and text presents and analyses the data gathered 
by the We Feel Fine project. Started in 2005 and launched in early 2006 
by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, We Feel Fine is based around a 
database assembled using a webcrawler that searches the blogosphere for 
statements of the form "I feel" or "I feel like". Any matches are stored 
along with as much contextual data as the webcrawler can find (a 
photograph nearby in the blog post, the poster's age, gender, and 
location, local weather). The database contained twelve million such 
entries by the time the book was published.

Harris and Kamvar are admirably candid in laying out the history, 
methodology, technology and in the case of the book's production even 
the finances of their project. The code listings included in the book 
are tantalising glimpses into how the We Feel Fine server works, 
allowing a rare chance for students and artists to study such a system, 
and are licenced under the GPLv3. The book is under the obscure but 
principled Creative Commons "Founders Copyright" licence which will 
automatically expire the copyright on the book in twenty years time. 
This is all invaluable for critique and study of the project by artists, 
academics and anyone with an interest in art and technology, and more 
artists should do it.

http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=371




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