14th
Weathermap of Feeling - 2 Weeks of Data
The other weathermaps that I saw seemed to portray patterns oppostite those that I found in my own map. After viewing other’s maps, I heard that the other creators found it easier to come up with demonstrations of happiness than sadness. When searching the news headlines and image sites like flickr.com for both emotions, she said that each day she found more headlines and images with the word “happy” in the headline that she did of the word “sad”. I found this to be very interesting, because in my own data collection I found the opposite. When I searched the news headlines for sad things, each day there was an endless list of tragic events to chose from. I found it very interesting that tragedy outweighs happiness and joy so greatly each day in the news; it seems to prove that this nation fixates on the horror of the world, rather than the postive things that happen each day. The other weathermap that I saw also tracked the weather of each day that she collected data from. I found this to be interesting as well, though each day seemed to be fairly nice out and such weather patterns seemed to have little effect on the other patterns of the data.
In my own data collection, I focused on the emotions happy and sad in terms of the events that take place in the daily lives of individuals. I have always been amazed by the way that one individual, or family can be celebrating a joyous occasion, such as a wedding or the birth of a child, while another individual or family suffer the most painful grief of a death. Based on this idea, I focused my data collection on happy events, such as weddings, engagement and birth announcements, and the small joys that are a part of daily life, and sad events such as death, obituaries, murders, natural disastors, and other things that disrupt daily life and cause incredible pain to those they effect. Each day I felt the joy of the people celebrating their 50th wedding anniversaries, or the birth of their first child, or the frosting-smeared smile on the face of a child at her first birthday party. Then I would look for death, and tragedy, which were far easier to find. Stories of brutal murders, serial killers, house fires that leave three or four dead, car accidents and robberies filled the screen, and as I read each one I was fasinated by the grief that each of these events must have caused. A house fire that left two college students dead must have shaken the families of those students to the core; such an unexpected horrible loss must have shock everyone who knew those students and disrupted their daily lives.
