Pretty Much the Most Relevant Thing Ever

Every now and then, as I randomly stumble across the vast landscape of the internet, I come across something so relevant and pertinent to IST 110H, that I simply have no choice but to make a blog post about it. This is one of those instances.

First, some background:

Jonathan Harris is a computer scientist and digital artist. He has a penchant for using these talents to attempt to make some sense of the seemingly infinite personal data that exists on the internet. Two of these projects are Universe and We Feel Fine.

Universe traverses the current spectrum of news stories, and attempts to assemble a snapshot full of entity-relationships and all sorts of other fun stuff in order to help make sense of the collective consciousness of society.

We Feel Fine performs a similar task, but, perhaps more relevantly, it scours the blogosphere to attempt to gain a barometric reading of sorts of writers' feelings, and popular writing subjects. With direct linking ability to blog posts and images contained within these particular blogs, the power of such a graphical representation is not to be underestimated.

It's simply amazing what the result can be when such distinctly different skillsets (art and computer science) come together. With this sort of graphical analysis, one can very easily evaluate the current feelings of a group of people, which, most likely, reflects on society as a whole.

Check this out.