I have a lot of interest in finding practical applications for data visualization techniques, where specific patterns are revealed by merging and visually depicting large numbers of seemingly discordant data points. Data visualization can be of potential use in analyzing population health outcomes by, for example, scanning large databases of specific medical interventions paired with outcomes and representing the results visually to physicians at the point of care, in order to facilitate making more informed decisions.

My latest favorite data visualization project is by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. Their project is called “We Feel Fine: An exploration of human emotion in six movements.” In this artfully crafted project, the creators have developed a system that 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.)” and organizes it by the author’s gender, age, and geographic location (information that is usually available from blog registries). The data is then visually organized in six different ways or “movements.”

Their website is definitely worth checking out.

Filed under: Innovation