The opening page of We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion reads a quote from "a woman in Maine." It sets the stage for the rest of the book.

I have a problem I'm sure many other bloggers face: I am perfectly comfortable sharing intimate details about my emotions with complete strangers I meet online but shy away from expressing my true feelings to anyone I know in real life.

For those unfamiliar, We Feel Fine is a project from Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar that's been online since 2006. At its core, the goal is to show the emotions of the authors behind millions of blog posts on the Web by looking for sentences that start with "I feel" or "I am feeling." It's an interactive artwork "authored by everyone."

We Feel Fine the book, also by Kamvar and Harris, is a selection of some of the best entries from the database of 12 million emotions, along with some insights into the growing dataset (mostly the former).

Here are some pages from the book to give you an idea.

Want to see more? You can actually flip through the entire book online.

Who Will Like the Book

As a supplement to the online artwork, which I'm a big fan of, the book works really well. It provides lots of good excerpts, and in the end, it's entertaining. The best comparison I can think of is PostSecret. You know the blog/book that features secrets from anonymous people. Similarly, We Feel Fine is a snapshot of emotions from people you don't know; however, even though they're complete strangers, you will no doubt identify with many of them. Basically, if you like PostSecret, you'll probably like this book. There's a slightly greater data spin to it though, which of course I appreciate.

Anyways, you don't really need to hear what I think. Just check out the entire book online and form your own opinion.

RIT student Nikki Graziano photographs math functions in the real world. Some are a stretch but others are dead on.

[via O'Reilly Radar | Thanks, JD]

Designers Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth looked at ink usage of some commonly-used typefaces, by hand-drawing them with ballpoint pens.

Scribble, scribble, scribble, and they got this simple bar chart with ink usage measured by, well, ink:

Impact font is such an ink hog. Such a drama queen.

See all the shots here.

[Thanks, @bambock]

It's funny how data is finding it's way into everyday objects. There was jewelry a few months ago and coins last month. Now we've got this experiment with Christmas ornaments from Really Interesting Group (RIG). The snowman's head is sized by the number of followers on Twitter; the (rain) bars represent miles traveled per month on Dopplr; the red shows listening habits on last.fm; and finally, the blue one shows apertures you've used over the year for photos uploaded to Flickr.

Useful? Sort of. Pretty? Yes. I certainly wouldn't complain if I found those under (or I guess, on) my Christmas tree.

Here are a couple more shots:

[via Waxy Links]

This experiment (below) by graduate student Pedro Miguel Cruz shows the decline of Maritime empires during the 19th and 20th centuries .

Pedro explains:

I don’t wanna call this small experiment of information visualization neither information art. Either way sounds too pretentious - as the visuals are not very sophisticated or elegant, and the way that the information is treated doesn’t enable the extraction of advanced knowledge. Although, it works very well as a ludic narrative. I ultimately found it very joyful.

So sit back and enjoy. It's fun to watch.

Let's for a second consider an alternative to view this data more analytically for some more insight and what not. I'm thinking an area graph ala Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg's History Flow for Wikipedia dynamics could be interesting. What do you think?

Jer Thorp, an artist and educator from Vancouver, Canada, visualizes when people "wake up" on Twitter, or when they say good morning, rather. Here it is in its 3-d globe glory. It's called GoodMorning!. Notice the wave.

Okay, wait, I know you're already furiously leaving or thinking about a comment on how absolutely useless and non-concrete this is - and Jer is the first to admit that - but there is obviously something to learn here.

However, it's late, and I'm tired, so I'll leave that up to you. But off the top of my head, I'm thinking a more relevant subject like disease or need of help and color coding that's more meaningful. Your turn.

[via datavisualization.ch]

The Stock Ticker Orbital Comparison, or STOC for short, from media student James Grant, uses a planetary system metaphor to display activity with the S&P 500. Each circle represents a stock and they orbit a planet-like (or sun?) thing in the middle.

Color, size, and transparency represent percent change, market capitalization, and moving average, respectively. Percent change relative to the rest of the market determines the speed at which a stock orbits - fast movers so to speak.

Here is the video demo with techno-ish background music and all:

You can also download and interact with the prototype yourself from the STOC site.

From an aesthetic point of view, it's pretty and fun to play with. I can see it running in the background in some futuristic stock market movie. From a more practical standpoint, I'm not so sure, but that isn't what STOC was developed for.

[Thanks, Todd]

This is a guest post by Craig Mod, who collaborated with Information Architects, to develop Web Trend Map. The site, which is largely inspired by iA's previous work, lets you curate links with sources you trust. This post describes the multiple iterations and decisions made during the design process.

Design and development of webtrendmap.com v1.0 took three months. During this period the interaction design and interface underwent countless subtle permutations. What we ended up with is almost totally unlike what we started with. There was a lot of painful iteration. A lot of gut wrenching backtracking.

Let's drill down and take a look at how we iterated on one key webtrendmap.com visual element: the Stack.

Stacks

Stacks are simple: each Stack represents the links of one Twitter user. A bigger Stack = more links. Despite the simplicity, the interface for these Stacks changed considerably from initial prototype to launch:

Prototype and final version (Stack v.1 and v.2):

The interaction model for Stack v.1 mouseover was:

1. display most recent link above Stack
2. move mouse up and click link to open in a new window
3. or click Stack to see next link

Here was our theory behind this model:

• you would 'deplete' all the Stacks on the map
• Stack states were saved in a cookie
• on followup visits, the Stack heights would represent only new links from your previous visit

The act of depleting the Stacks would be satisfying! And having a map of empty Stacks was not unlike achieving inbox zero! ... So we thought.

Sadly, this theory was far removed from reality.

Some of the problems this model presented:

1. As soon as you clicked the Stack you 'lost' the link.
2. For Stacks with many links, you had to click dozens of times. Combine this with #1 and you have a recipe for nervous clicking. ("I don't want to accidentally miss anything good!")
3. Seeing only one link at a time made it extremely difficult to understand relativity between links posted before or after.

The idea of depleting Stacks and 'zeroing out' a map was frustrating and stressful in practice. In short: it felt like a chore. We knew we had to reconsider the model.

Stacks v1.5

The first major iterative changes were:

• Move links to side of Stack for easier mousing-over
• Show five links at a time

Stack v1.5 (Stack mouseover) and Stack v1.5 (link mouse-over):

Users could still deplete Stacks by clicking them and seeing multiple links greatly increased parsing speed and solved problems #2, and #3.

To keep visual clutter down we hid Tweet text related to links, revealing them only on mouseover.

Still, there was no intuitive way to allow reverse movement through the Stack. And any attempts to graft a system of moving up and down the Stack onto the interface felt like we were making something that should be simple, more and more unnecessarily complex.

We liked the data, but the interaction was broken.

Trending Links Sidebar

The breakthrough came in the form of a sidebar: the 'Trending Links' sidebar is an aggregate (based on frequency) of all the links on a map.

Adding this gave us the insight we needed to confidently state the following:

1. Depleting the Stacks and zeroing out the map was too much work for too little gain.
2. Individual user link postings weren't (for the most part) very interesting but the aggregate of the map was.
3. The Trending Links sidebar replaced the Stacks as our main data interface.

With these points clearly in mind we were able to execute a final Stack design and interaction revision.

Stacks v2.0

The final Stack changes:

1. Expand tweet text by default
2. Remove Stack depletion functionality
3. Clicking a Stack brings you to the links overview page for that user

The Stacks started as a tiring, complicated, awkward interface to a user's links. They became a simplified gateway to historical link data for a user. That's a hell of a shift of functionality, and one we were able to achieve only through progressive, constant, sometimes painful iteration.

Was it worth the pain? The pain is what drives us — let's us intuit we're breaking down non-trivial problems. So the pain was more than worth it. The webtrendmap.com we arrived at is an order of magnitude more usable than what we started with.

As a bonus, these design iterations were responsible for the creation of the 'Trending Links' sidebar and individual user historical link views. Two excellent additions to the site.

We've cataloged more than 200,000 links in less than a month of public operation. Our roadmap for what we want to produce with this data is pretty inspiring. But you know what? It's going to change. What we see and understand now, and what we'll see and understand mid-production will invariably differ. And we're fine with that — we're iterating, and sometimes it hurts, but the end result is almost always satisfying.

Craig Mod is a developer, book designer, publisher, and professional world-wide digital hobo. He collaborates with individuals and companies in Tokyo on social media projects. Find more about Craig on his site, or follow him on Twitter.

The 2009 MTV Video Music Awards are on right now (and I'm sure all of you are watching). Check out the live VMA Twitter tracker by Stamen and Radian6. It's kind of fun to watch, even if you aren't tuned into MTV. Celebrity profile pictures are dynamically sized by how much people are talking about them on Twitter. Apparently Kanye is performing right now... or he did something stupid.

Ben Fry, well-known for Processing and plenty of other data goodness, announced his most recent piece, On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces, made possible by The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online.

The visualization explores the evolution of Charles Darwin's theory of, uh, evolution. It began as a less-defined 150,000-word text in the first edition and grew and developed to a 190,000-word theory in the sixth edition.

Watch where the updates in the text occur over time. Chunks are removed, chunks are added, and words are changed. Blocks are color-coded by edition. Roll over blocks to see the text underneath.

As usual, excellent work, Mr. Fry.

Happy labor day!