WE FEEL (2014): NPR in the US reported on a Twitter reading app developed in Australia that takes the real-time emotional temperature of a region as a way to responsively allocate (mental health?) resources. http://wefeel.csiro.au/#/

What is We Feel?

We Feel is a project that explores whether social media—specifically Twitter—can provide an accurate, real-time signal of the world’s emotional state. Who’s involved? We Feel is a joint project between computer scientists at CSIRO and mental health researchers at The Black Dog Institute. It has also been generously supported by Amazon AWS and GNIP. For technical questions, please contact Cécile Paris. For all other questions, please contact Helen Christensen.

How can I cite this?

Please use the following reference:
Milne, D., Paris, C., Christensen, H., Batterham, P. and O’Dea, B. (2014) The We Feel emotion explorer. Retrieved from: http://wefeel.csiro.au

Why did you make it?

Hundreds of millions of tweets are posted every day. A huge topic of conversation is, of course, the authors; what they are up to, what they have encountered, and how they feel about it. We Feel is about tapping that signal to better understand the prevalence and drivers of emotions. We hope it can uncover, for example, where people are most at risk of depression and how the mood and emotions of an area/region fluctuate over time. It could also help understand questions such as how strongly our emotions depend on social, economic and environmental factors such as the weather, time of day, day of the week, news of a major disaster or a downturn in the economy. Whilst there is already a wealth of academic research on mental health and wellbeing, such as the Black Dog Index, this information is traditionally gathered by surveys and isn’t a real-time indication of what’s happening day to day. The traditional approach is time consuming and expensive. Twitter offers a large and fast sample of information that could hold the key to a real-time view of our emotions.

Is this spying or invading people’s privacy?

Fair question. We Feel only uses public tweets and user profiles, so please don’t be worried that we are spying on your private messages. Even the public data we collect can be sensitive, however, because it can involve vulnerable, distressed individuals. We have specifically designed this system to only look at the big picture: there is no way for anyone using this system to narrow down and identify any one person.

Why don’t you look at Facebook?

Facebook would also be an excellent data source for this kind of work. The problem is privacy. In general, people (quite wisely) keep their Facebook activity private, which leaves little for us researchers to work with. Most of the activity on Twitter, on the other hand, is open to the public. Questions about technical stuff How do you obtain the tweets? We Feel has three sources of tweets: a random 1% sample from the public Twitter API (affectionately known as the gardenhose), a random 10% sample from GNIP (called the decahose), and a third source that specifically monitors the public Twitter API for a large vocabulary of emotion terms (we call this the emohose).

What volume of tweets do you handle?

The gardenhose delivers about 900 thousand English tweets a day, of which about 250 thousand contain emotion terms. The decahose predictably delivers ten times that amount. The emohose delivers about 27 million English tweets a day, all of which contain emotion terms. That averages out to 19 thousand tweets per minute, though this fluctuates quite wildly.

How do you identify emotions?

We Feel uses a large vocabulary of emotion terms that were compiled from multiple sources, including the ANEW and LIWC corpora, and a list of moods from LiveJournal. We conducted a crowdsourcing task (using Crowdflower) to organise these terms against Parrott’s hierarchy of emotions. The emotions are colour-coded using a dataset of affective norms provided by the Center for Reading Research at Ghent University.

Compare with the. 2005 art project, We Feel Fine: http://www.wefeelfine.org

Mission

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. 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.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains.

The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion.

We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what’s on our blogs, what’s in our hearts, what’s in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life. – Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar May 2006