Tomorrow’s Data Visualization Today

Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar may be doing the most interesting data visualization work out there right now.

I first saw their work at wefeelfine.org and was so impressed with the elegance of it.

In that project, they crawl millions of blogs around the world to find certain phrases that indicate what the blogger is feeling and then traverse the blog to collect meta data on that person like gender and age.

But it’s all manageable to you as a user. It seems like you have the entire possible world of people (on the Web), willing to share what they’re feeling, at your fingertips.

Now they have a new project being exhibited at SFMOMA called “I Want You to Want Me,” which I’d say is just as good, but it’s actually even better.

Again, they’re pulling data from the global database known as the Web, but this time from dating services all around the world. And that data is presented in several of what they call “movements.”

For example, it algorithmically pairs people together (who don’t know each other) based on what they say in their dating profile. (Who is your soul mate on the planet . . .?)

And, you find out that the top turn on is . . .

Anybody building a Web service or designing software should be able to find inspiration in their work.