For my Feeling Weathermap, I took screen captures of WeFeelFine, the daily New York Times, the daily weather report for the nation, and also select horoscopes that contained extreme emotion predictions and also quotes from articles in the Times. Only US stories were used. Information was collected twice a day, morning and night, and kept in Word. The time at which information was gatherered was recorded. By using screen shots for WeFeelFine, I was able to see the amount of happy or sad emotion dots were present at that time.
I found it interesting to see that on some days there were no returns for happy or sad and on others there were far more than other days. Concerning WeFeelFine, lots of times happy feelings only appeared later on in the day, but sad feelings appeared all through the day. Does this mean that some people dont wake up happy and that it takes something that occurs during the day to make them feel good? But why people can wake up sad for no good reason?
Alot of happy feelings were accompanied with a qualification for why they were happy. Such as “I feel so happy to work here because I feel like i fit in,” or “I made the decision and now Im pressure free.” However, when people felt sad, the only thing they wrote was “I feel sad,” or “I feel depressed.” they did not give a reason, as though this was thier normal everyday disposition and that happiness was not the norm.
Kaitlyn used headlines, pictures that accompanied the headlines, daily weather, Facebook statuses, and Facebook posts. You can defintatley tell what the important news stories were throughout the weeks because they continued to show up again and again throughout the week.
Kaitlyn’s approach allowed the viewer to infer the feelings of the day because even thought not all the pictures were accompanied by a headline, you could tell what the emotions were in the picture. Some of the important concepts that repeated throughout Kaitlyns project were the fires in California, The redsocks winning the World Series, and Joe Torre getting fired.
A similarity between our projects concerns the change of feelings throughout the day. With mine, happy feelings only appeared later in the day in WeFeelFine. In Kaitlyns Facebook captures, people would not update thier status until later int he day and the text would involve an event that occured during that day. If there was a post that was new in the morning, it was usually friends saying they missed each other rather than talking about something that happened.
In order to make our projects more accurate, I could have concentrated more on the headlines available throughout the day instead of just WeFeelFine because only a limited number of pepople use that application and the whole world is concerned with the news.
I could have also paid more attention to the region which the feelings were coming from to see if it coincided more with the weather or the headlines happening. If the class wanted to be able to see patterns in our data we could create a flash that included a rollover not only of a date but of the state or region in which the feelings occured. A graph of the number of happy or sad feelings per day would also help so that we could compare which news stories and weather triggered more emotions.
