The art of data expression & design

A fascinating web developer, artist and modern anthropologist, Johnathan Harris' has made some profoundly innovative and artistic tools for exploring human cultural data, knowledge and creativity on the web.

The following are some examples of projects he's been apart of:

1. We Feel Fine  a global compendium exploring human emotion as it unfolds on blog posts across the web. 'Murmers' is how I like to check the online emotion pulse of the planet. Some of the 'Montages' will leave you breathless in the presence of their visual poetry.

2. Just Curious a place of anonymous questions and answers - where seemingly anythings goes. Despite the stated intention of 'strangers helping strangers'.

3. Word Count a listing of the most popular words in the English language. Genius for us writer types.

4. 10 x 10 a news discovery tool scans leading international news sources, performs weighted linguistic analysis of the terms, language and stories that are emerging.

5. Phylotaxis a scientific discovery tool exploring the space where science meets culture. Phylotaxis scours the web for recent updates, discoveries and innovation through out the scientific, cultural landscapes.

6. The universe of modern myth, the constellations, stars and stories of our time ~ as they unfold across contemporary culture.

7. The time capsule  a glimpse of the world that will be re-opened in March 2, 2020.

8. Oh! I almost forgot Love Lines explores desire as expressed through textual imprints of 'love' & 'hate'.

Overall Johnathan's work is elegant linguistic analysis mixed with artistic management of large amounts of web data. It should give ethnographers, linguists, communicators and web folks plenty of juicy ideas for understanding human relationships, knowledge, emotion and mythos as it grows across the net.

Critics might point to the obvious privacy concerns and long term implications of  systems designed for such dynamic data analysis. Personally the potential for these sorts of projects to inform art, change, science and social understanding seem immense and I hope they are tools and inspirations that remain in the public domain for years to come.
 
Johnathan Harris' colleague Sep Kamvar, professor of computational mathematics and data mining at Stanford University is another innovator to watch out for.

~I.B.