Customer Reviews

We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion

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I just picked up a copy of this book after seeing it at Barnes and Noble. A friend had sent me a link to the website back in 2006, I recognized the name and so was immediately curious. Visit [...] to see the original project that this book is based on - the first time I saw it I spent 2 hours browsing through the chaos and peeking into people's personal lives.


The book is a completely different experience than the website with more differences than similarities, but just as fascinating as its web incarnation. Like with the website the first time I saw it I have become addicted to this book. The largest factor that sets the book apart from the website is the incredible amount of statistical analysis that the authors provide you with. Instead of just reading a feeling, the authors tell you how frequently that feeling is felt, who most commonly feels it and why.

They also break down feelings by location, date, tell you what feelings most commonly occur with each other. How feelings most commonly change as people age and tons of other interesting observations.


The book is also comprised of people's personal "uncensored" photography. Some are better than others, all are from the internet so quality isn't great, but each photo is paired with a sentence from the same blog post where the photo came from. The combination is powerful and it's amazing to see these people and also read how they feel. It reminded me of PostSecret.


This book makes a great coffee table/pop psychology book. In its 288 pages there is tons to discover. It is also an incredibly unique and impressive project; one that your friends will be happy you turned them on to.

This reader was charmed, excited and inspired by this book. "We Feel Fine" operates on several levels. Physically, it has the heft and graphic quality of a medium sized, high-end coffee table book. Its content delights with the immediate impact of the really cool photos of people and things. The excellence of the pictures surprised me given that they are pulled from the blogs together with the text which expresses the "feeling" of the title.
This sixty-something guy was particularly impressed with the insight into the minds of those who tend to be a bit younger than I. It has certainly proved to be a point of contact for provocative discussions with my children who are of the generation that provides most of the substance of the "we" who "feel fine". In that sense it is revelatory and hopeful that "the kids are alright". You see this both through the unique individuals and the information that is extrapolated from so many of us. Finally, it may well draw you into the website of the same name which minute to minute provides data for what may well be a sequel in the making of this "Almanac of Human Emotion".

"We Feel Fine" is a collection of quotes and photos from blogs from all over the English world. All of these quotes were garnered from sentences that began "I feel." As the writers state, "Drawing from a database of more than 12 million human feelings collected over 3 years from personal blogs on the Internet, 'We Feel Fine' presents a comprehensive contemporary portrait of the world's emotional landscape, exploring the ups and downs of everyday life in all its color, chaos, and candor." The book is arranged as a coffee table book. One can simply pick it up, open to a page and view the beautiful photos and quotes. The authors have created different sections based on gender, specific emotions, locations, weather and topics. For those interested in more detail, the authors have provided statistical analysis of the data they have mined as well as the computer code that they used to obtain the data.

I really enjoyed the time I spent flipping through and reading this book. I didn't know what to expect and it was a pleasant surprise. I especially liked this "life sentence" that they included toward the end of the book, summing up "major emotional themes as we age.": "We start simple (11-14), but soon fill up with angst (15-18) and feelings of confinement (19-22), until we leave those behind to go conquer the world (23-26), before gradually trading ambition for balance (27-30), developing an appreciation for our bodies (31-35) and our children (31-35), and evolving a sense of connectedness (36-40), for which we feel grateful (36-40), then happy (41-49), calm (41-49), and finally blessed (50+)."

This is a great gift for any creative-type in your life. I've admired what artist Jonathan Harris has been creating for the past few years, specifically "I Want You to Want Me", "The Whale Hunt" and "We Feel Fine". Unlike so much of what is called `creative' online, his projects are thoughtful, innovative and feeling. The work seamlessly weaves the human experience with its inherent aesthetic beauty. Jonathan seems to come from a true place which is probably why so many people are drawn to his work. The online medium has not failed Harris by any means, but now it is even more accessible. Once again, a great gift for someone else (or yourself).

More info about Jonathan's project here: [...]

In an age where we are surrounded by social networks and blogs and Twitter, it can be overwhelming to try to learn something from them. Well, after reading this book I think I have found a good place to jump in for many, and for many others I've found a kind of documentary of blogosphere to this point.

The book We Feel Fine is derived off of a pretty impressive website that was developed by the creators of the book Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris. The website goes through millions of blogs every day and picks out any sentence or phrase that starts with 'I feel' or 'I'm feeling' and then adds them to a database.

After four years of collecting data Kamvar and Harris have compiled this book. When I first got it last week I spent a fair amount of time giving it a once through, but the strange thing is how much in the last couple of days I have been using it as a reference text. I say reference because not only does the book deal with a flurry of emotions, but it categorizes them and then analyzes them. Each emotion is bordered with all kinds of data associated with it. What are the circumstances that cause this feeling? What is the most common weather that accompanies this feeling? What other feelings are related to it?

Now, every time I find myself feeling a particular emotion I pick this up from my coffee table. I want to know why I feel what I feel, which is why I think really does a good job in attracting different audiences. On one hand you have people who will enjoy it for the design aspects and the personal, saddening, or funny combination of pictures and feelings. And on the other hand you have people who will want to know more of the the how and the why more than the what, in which case there is the data. Of course there is nothing wrong with enjoying both :).

When all is said and done this is a great text. I find myself coming back to it over and over again to learn more about myself and look forward opportunities to share it with friends. I think more than anything that keeps me picking it up again is that even though it is not hooked up to the net, I feel myself coming closer to the online community the book represents.

I reviewed We Feel Fine for furtherfield.org here - [...]

It's a great book that I recommend to anyone interested in art, design, social media or cyberculture. Here's an exert from that review -

Dictionary definitions, statistical breakdowns of the kinds of words, ages and genders of bloggers and other demographic and affective data are presented in compact graphic form on every page, and larger charts show more general conclusions. Feelings, or the words used to refer to them, are shown to vary between genders and as people age. This is an exemplary application of Edward Tufte's science of the graphical presentation of information. They even have sparklines. But that science is applied to data that is at its heart qualitative rather than quantitative.

Such "data visualization" was a hot trend in 2009. Visualisations of crime rates, corruption, climate change and other issues can be produced using such data, and have become an important weapon in the arsenal of visual persuasion. On the We Feel Fine web site, feeling data is mapped to coloured blobs in an interactive user interface to the constantly updated (every minute) database. In the book, feelings and demographic information are processed to produce graphics that represent the prevalence of feelings over time, between genders, in different locations and in relation to each other. But as visual persuasion this is directed back to the vividness of human, qualitative experience rather than a more political or economic agenda.

"Sentiment analysis" was also hot trend in social media marketing in 2009 and its limitations quickly became apparent. Current systems simply cannot handle irony, sarcasm, regional differences in the usage of words and in many cases even simple negation. The We Feel Fine system is an exercise in gathering affective or sentiment data to visualise, but it avoids the pitfalls of sentiment analysis by automating only the gathering of the statements of emotion themselves, not analysis of how they relate to what they refer to. This is a classic example of well-chosen limits strengthening a project.
The problem of the relationship between qualitative (how you feel) and quantitative (how many people feel what you feel) data and how to deal with this in a non-voodoo way are avoided in We Feel Fine because of this.

Another 2009 hot trend was "big data", the assembling of datasets that vary from many megabytes to many gigabytes in size. Datasets from regional and national governments, scientific research and freedom of information requests can be used in "data mining" to search for facts among the numbers. The We Feel Fine system is a good example of a big data dataset (and API, application programming interface, for accessing that data over the web). Unlike global temperature data it neither offers the possibility of objective accuracy nor involves any great risk if it lacks it. But it does reintroduce the human subjectivity that big data threatens to replace with numbers.

The striking thing about this is that although the We Feel Fine book is very much of the zeitgeist for 2009 the web-based system it presents started five years ago in 2005. At that time blogs were regarded by the mass media as disposable, narcissistic and somehow inauthentic. They were an unlikely subject at that time for art concerned with the authentic expression of emotion. We Feel Fine's history, subject and results therefore both prefigure and go beyond the current state of the art in Internet social and corporate culture.

Having been a fan of the We Feel Fine website for some time, I have to admit that I was skeptical about how well it could translate to print. So much of what I loved about the website was its interactivity, and that's obviously not something that can be preserved in a print format (yet). Part of me also wondered if the premise itself - surveying and analyzing the blogosphere to extract meta-observations about emotion - would seem as interesting when extracted from its natural environment (the Internet).

I'm happy to say that this book shattered my fears about it! It's a pretty thorough compendium of human feelings, with enough interesting facts and figures in it to piece together a college anthropology thesis, but it also has the stunningly beautiful presentation of a high-class coffee table book (eye candy AND brain candy! How about that?) I particularly love the extra pages at the back that highlight an assortment of other interesting observations, such as the correlation between certain emotions and certain world events. The authors pulled things from the data that I never would have considered, leading me into some really surprising trains of thought.

I highly recommend this book, especially if you're a design nerd like me!

Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris are the new curators of the human condition. In the era of online media where everything is immediate and granular, Kamvar & Harris created a smart way to roll up what everyone is feeling. They do it in a way that gives us a window into our collective zeitgeist. It is a Twitter stream for the human race, and one that has the aesthetics and sensibility of an artist.

It is a really interesting documentation of their website. "We feel fine..." It is delightful, sad, and like the authors say, many times a mirror.

It captures the duality of our most intimate thoughts and feelings which we share with the world.

This review is short and simple. This book is not worth buying in my opinion. We Feel Fine has a website online, which is amazingly cool, and has all the information the book has and is constantly growing. On another note the book is beautiful and has great pictures. This book is for people who have extra money to spend and /or love the feeling of a beautiful book. which does not fit my description. That is why Im giving it 3 Stars.