I am addicted to ted.com, a site which has to be one of the most valuable on the Internet. The Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) Conferences gather together the brightest and most fascinating minds in one place, resulting in an outpouring of thought provoking lectures.

Jonathan Harris, a luminary in his field, delivers one such talk and speaks on how he combines art and computer science to understand the human story.

His first creation entitled We Feel Fine, is a program which scans blogposts for the phrases “I am feeling” or “I feel” and then takes these sentences, and assigns them a color based on the phrase’s emotion. This creates a larger snapshot of the internet’s mood which can be explored in greater detail.

A second project consists of numerous photographs of an arctic whale hunt. These can be filtered by character, times, excitement levels and other criteria to construct a sub-story taken from the main narrative.

For the third project, Harris travels to Bhutan, interviews a swath of natives and attempts to portray their happiness visually.

An awesome talk and one that shows shows that the evoluton of digital storytelling is in good hands…

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