Overview of the We Feel Project
We Feel is a project that explores whether social media – specifically Twitter – can provide an accurate, real-time signal of the worlds emotional state.
It is a collaboration led by mental health researchers at the Black Dog Institute, computer scientists at CSIRO and information technology specialists Amazon AWS and GNIP.
Emotional tweets are captured, analysed, and displayed visually in real time on a website (wefeel.csiro.au). Data on the tweets and their emotional content is made available to the public for their direct use.
The online tool passively analyses a ‘massive pipe’ of Tweets up to 32,000 tweets per minute, or around 27 million tweets per day. We Feel uses language-processing techniques to look at the English words people use in these posts and then maps these words to a hierarchy or ‘wheel of emotions’.