Jonathan Harris: The Web's secret stories

TL;DR

The speaker discusses the creation of interactive tools to study and visualize human expression, such as analyzing blog entries to understand people's emotions and using a digital night sky to represent current events and concepts in a visual way.

Transcript

So I really consider myself a storyteller. But I don't really tell stories in the usual way, in the sense that I don't usually tell my own stories. Instead, I'm really interested in building tools that allow large numbers of other people to tell their stories, people all around the world. I do this because I think that people actually have a lot in... Read More

Key Insights

• 👥 People have a lot in common, but often struggle to see it, due to gaps such as language, ethnicity, age, gender, sexuality, wealth, education, and religion.
• 💭 Self-expression is a universal human desire that has traditionally been limited by a lack of sympathetic listeners.
• 🌐 With the rise of the internet, self-expression has moved online, leaving behind digital footprints that can be studied and analyzed.
• 🔎 "We Feel Fine" is a project that scans blog entries for phrases like "I feel" or "I am feeling" and categorizes them by age, gender, location, and weather conditions.
• 💡 "We Feel Fine" provides an interactive visualization of human emotions, with brightly colored particles representing positive feelings and darkly colored particles representing negative feelings.
• 🧠 "We Feel Fine" uses passive observation, studying people's online behavior without their knowledge, to provide honest and candid insights into human emotions.
• 🔍 The "Yahoo! Time Capsule" project asked people around the world open-ended questions about topics like love, anger, and belief to create a snapshot of global emotions in 2006.
• 🌌 "Universe: Revealing Our Modern Mythology" is an interactive project that represents real-world events and concepts as constellations in a shifting star field, allowing users to explore global and personal mythologies.

Questions & Answers

Q: How does the speaker analyze blog entries to determine the age, gender, and location of the writers?

The speaker's project, "We Feel Fine," scans the newly-posted blog entries every two or three minutes and looks for the phrases "I feel" or "I am feeling." It then grabs the sentence up to the period and uses geolocation and time data to deduce the age, gender, and geographical location of the writer.

Q: How does "We Feel Fine" visualize the collected feelings?

"We Feel Fine" visualizes the collected feelings as a madly swarming mass of particles, with each particle representing a single human feeling. The color of each particle corresponds to the type of feeling, and the diameter represents the length of the sentence. Users can click on any particle to expand and read the full sentence expressing the feeling.

Q: What is the purpose of "Universe: Revealing Our Modern Mythology"?

The purpose of "Universe" is to represent current events and concepts in a visual way using a digital night sky. Users can explore different themes and see how they are connected, creating their own personal mythology. It provides a way to understand and visualize the global and personal stories that shape our world today.

Q: How does the speaker use the Yahoo! Time Capsule to capture the world in 2006?

The speaker divided the Yahoo! Time Capsule into ten themes and asked open-ended questions related to those themes, such as "What do you love?" or "What makes you angry?" People from around the world submitted their answers in the form of pictures, words, and drawings, which were then projected onto canyon walls and transmitted into outer space.

Summary & Key Takeaways

• The speaker is interested in building tools that allow people around the world to tell their stories and express themselves.

• One of the projects mentioned is "We Feel Fine," which scans blog entries for emotional phrases and visualizes them as a swirling mass of particles representing different emotions.

• Another project mentioned is "Universe: Revealing Our Modern Mythology," which uses a digital night sky to represent current events and concepts, allowing users to explore different themes and see how they are connected.