Talks Jonathan Harris : The Web’s secret stories
Talks Jonathan Harris : The Web’s secret stories
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_harris_tells_the_web_s_secret_stories.html
So I really consider myself… a storyteller… but… I don’t really tell stories in a usual way in the sense of 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… to tell their stories… people around the world. I do this because I think that… I think people actually have a lot in commune, I think people are very similar but I also think that we have trouble seeing that… you know as a look around the world I see a lot of gaps but I think we all see a lot of gaps… and we define ourselves by our gaps, you know there is language gaps, there is ethnicity and racial gaps, there is…there is age gaps, there is gender gaps, there are sexuality gaps, there is wealth and… and money gaps, there is education gaps, there is also religious gaps, you know we have all this gaps and I think we like our gaps because they make us feel like we identify with something, some small community but I think that actually the ??? gaps we really have in commune and I think one thing we have in commune is a very deep need to express ourselves I think this is very old human desire, it’s nothing new, but the thing about self expression is that there is traditionally been some balance between the desire that we have to express ourselves and the number of sympathic friend who are willing to stand around and listen. This also is nothing new, since the ??? of human history with ??? some balance by making art, writing poems, singing songs, scripting editorials and send them in a newspaper , gossiping with friends, this is nothing new, what’s new is that in the last several years a lot of this very traditional physical human activities ??? moving into the internet. And that’s happened people ??? been living ??? footprints, footprints that tell stories of their moment of self expression, and so what I do is… I… I write computer program that study very large sets of this footprints and then try to draw conclusions about the people who leave them, what they feel, what they think, what’s different in the world today than usual, this sort of questions. One project that explores this idea, which is made about a year ago, is a piece called “WE FEEL FINE”. This is a piece that every ?? minutes scan the world newly posted blog entries for ??? all the phrases “I feel” or “I am feeling”. ??? is grab the sentences up to the period and then automatically try to ??? the age, gender and geographic location of the person that wrote that sentence. And then knowing the geographic location and the time we can also then figure out the weather when that person wrote the sentence. All of this information is saved in a database that collects about twenty thousand feelings a day, it’s been running ??? it’s reached ??? ??? human feelings now, and I show you a glimpse of ??? information is ??? visualized. So this is “WE FEEL FINE”, what you see here are a madly swarming mass of particles each of which represents a single human feeling that ??? in the last few hours. The color of each particle corresponds of the type of felling inside so that a happy positive feelings are brightly colored and sad and negative feelings are darkly colored, the diameter of each date represents the length of the sentence inside so that the large dates contains large sentences and the small dates contains small sentences. Any date can be clicked and expended and we see here “I would just feel much better if I could curl up in his arms right know and feel his affection for me in the embrace of his body and the tenderness of his lips” so it’s get pretty hot and steamy sometimes in the world of human emotions… and all of this are ?steaded? by people “I know that objectively it really doesn’t mean much but after spending so many years as a small fish in a big pond it’s nice to feel bigger again” the dates exibe human qualities, they… they can have their own physic and swam ??? around
