We feel fine and searching the emotional web

We present We Feel Fine, an emotional search engine and web-based artwork whose mission is to collect the world's emotions to help people better understand themselves and others. We Feel Fine continuously crawls blogs, microblogs, and social networking sites, extracting sentences that include the words "I feel" or "I am feeling", as well as the gender, age, and location of the people authoring those sentences. The We Feel Fine search interface allows users to search or browse over the resulting sentence-level index, asking questions such as "How did young people in Ohio feel when Obama was elected?" While most research in sentiment analysis focuses on algorithms for extraction and classification of sentiment about given topics, we focus instead on building an interface that provides an engaging means of qualitative exploration of emotional data, and a flexible data collection and serving architecture that enables an ecosystem of data analysis applications. We use our observations on the usage of We Feel Fine to suggest a class of visualizations called Experiential Data Visualization, which focus on immersive item-level interaction with data. We also discuss the implications of such visualizations for crowdsourcing qualitative research in the social sciences.