The power of data and the need for aggregation

The New York Times published an article yesterday about how statisticians are quite hot (i.e. in demand) these days. That's cause the almighty organism called Internet and other machinery help us gather a ton of data. And now we're not quite sure how to deal with it. This calls for the aggregation, visualization and compartmentalization of an ocean of figures, numerics and letters:

“We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Digital Business. “But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.”

Why this gets me so giddy, I don't know. But I feel as if it opens up a whole other realm of playfulness with conveying information, using spiders, graphical imagery and interactivity.

I guess, some webby folks have already understood and found a way of visualizing the power of data. Jonathan Harris, one very inspiring net artist, has done so in various of his projects, one of my favorite being We Feel Fine.

The project does this:

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".

It's a small supernova of colorful dots that signify emotions. You can sort them. You can look at the individual entries. It's a lovely way of gauging moods on the internet.

Here a video lecture by the artist on TED:

Now I just need to learn programming.