Plenty of positivity today, or at least when I took a screen capture (via http://www.emoto2012.org/)
You may be familiar with the work of Dr. Masaru Emoto, in which he claims that human consciousness, specifically positive or negative thoughts, can have an effect on the structures formed in freezing water. Whether you believe his claims or not, there is no doubt that human consciousness can alter the memories, perspectives and perceptions of another based on the information projected. A creative project started by data artist Mortiz Stefaner and design group Studio NAND from Germany, is out to capture and document the massive amounts of positive or negative feelings and emotions of tweets concerning the 2012 Olympic games. This project was funded by the British Arts Council as part of the cultural Olympiad.
The Emoto team has put together a beautifully simple website that reads and sorts through keywords related to this summer’s Olympics. The web site is intuitive and allows for the representation of statistical reoccurring topics and emotions through visualizations. The site allows you to read Olympic tweets published in real time, as well as blogs where more formal discussions can be had.
Keywords like gymnastics, Usain Bolt or Gold medal, are all searched for and their emotionally charged language is tallied, in real-time, by Emoto2012.org. Red and orange ribbon animations grow, from the header of a topic, as the amount of positive emotional comments are tweeted. Blue ribbons represent the negative feedback and these ribbon animations allow for a quick gauge of how the people on twitter feel about the particular issue. Hovering the mouse over the topic’s title gives you how many total tweets have mentioned it in the past minute as well as the average sentiment in a percent.
Designing a website that collects all this information can be an extremely daunting task, let alone interpreting it correctly. The Emoto team had ambitious plans to collect Tweets in many languages for a complete global depiction, but it was soon clear that this would be extremely difficult and would probably deliver faulty and inaccurate information. For this reason, Emoto2012.org only gathers information about English tweets. No word on whether or not it picks up online sarcasm, but I doubt it, considering I have a tough time deciphering it myself. Regional language adds yet another level of possible communication breakdown.
Emoto is free and will be online until the end of the 2012 Olympics. Surely future iterations of this idea will be attempted, and software improved to capture as much information as accurately as possible. If you like the idea of seeing emotion on a global scale, check out Wefeelfine.org for a similar ongoing project.
Cabe