Weathermap Reaction
Looking at my group member’s work a pattern different from mine did emerge. She gathered data from obituaries and articles about things such as car accidents for sad and wedding and baby announcements for happy. The “climates” tended to be leaning towards the sad. It was easier to come up with events to search and yeilded a search with more vareity in the subject of the articles for sad. It seemed that there were more different types of sad events covered in the news than different types of happy events. The happy events seemed to be the same day to day while the sad was a different tragedy each day.
The weather map of feeling in my group member’s work seems to lean towards the sadder events. Unfortunately, looking at the news it would seem that more sad events happen every day. Why is it that day to day happy events are not as frequently reported as day to day sad events such as murders, car accidents, robberies and other types of saddening events? The news seems to cling to tragedies for interesting stories, a happy event doesn’t seem to grab the medias attention as well.
My work seemed to evoke a different feeling. A happier pattern emerged. I looked at daily news headlines, weather, flickr, and we feel fine. Looking through the news headlines I looked for headlines that contained the words happy or sad, not just articles that were about happy or sad events. I found that it was easier to locate news headlines containing the words happy. Although I didn’t have difficulty locating articles about sad events, there were not as many articles that contained the word sad in their headline.
I found a similar pattern in looking at flickr. Searching for sad pictures proved to be more difficult. Also, at the top of each search there was a count of how many pictures the search yeilded. The search for happy pictures yeilded thousands more pictures than the pictures for sad. I don’t know why this would be, maybe it’s because if people feel sad they do not feel like posting a picture of it and sharing it with the world. I don’t know the true reason but it could be anything.
By looking through the data I collected a pattern of happiness being portrayed much more than sadness emerged. Generally, the weather I collected was nice and sunny most of the days I collected the data. But, I only collected the weather for the city I was in while the rest of the data I collected was for anywhere in the entire country, so it is unlikely there is a link and the weather was a cause for the happiness. Maybe happy was easier to search in headlines because when something that is happy and deemed to be worth reporting happens people are excited to plaster it across their headlines to counteract the sheer volume of sad news that my group member found.
