By Coy Pink

I’m so excited to announce that a photo Alec took of me as well as a quote from my blog has been included in a book!  The book is called We Feel Fine:  An Almanac of Human Emotion. The mission of the project (which resulted in the making of the book) is quite interesting:

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

I was contacted a number of months ago and asked for permission to have my quote and a picture from the blog included in the book. Of course I said yes! What a fun opportunity. While perusing the preview pages online a few weeks ago, I noticed a familiar picture. It turns out that our sex blogging friends Mina and Sylvanus (from At Longing’s End) are also included in We Feel Fine. I found it amusing that I was able to recognize Mina’s ass (and Sylvanus’ photographic style) in a sea of other pictures.

This is what the page looks like that our picture is on:

Thanks for letting me share my excitement about this book with you! I can’t wait to get my copy in the mail.