So the Times has come up with this thing. They call it " What One Word Describes Your Current State of Mind?" which seems a bit clunky and long winded, but I guess it gets the point across. (I'm just going to continue referring to it as the Word-o-Matic, because everybody loves something that's o-Matic!)
Essentially, the Word-o-Matic is a data collection engine. You type provide a word as per the article's title's instructions, punch a button describing yourself as either a McCain or Obama supporter and submit your data. The engine aggregates the ways other people are feeling and presents the data on the screen as the actual words people input. The more frequently submitted a word is, the larger and more opaque it appears in the stream of words, which have a kind of waterfall quality to them, i.e. the less popular a word, the smaller and further down on the screen it appears. So words like "anxious" and "hopeful" appear near on the first line in like a size 48 font, while "thrilled," "bored," "eager," and "pensive" appear on the bottom row in a faint size 18 font. The words are continually updated, so they're always shifting, left to right, like a flowing stream (the water analogies here are very apt and useful).
I'm assuming that NYT has some tech-nerds and/or editors massaging the submitted data so that words like "slutty," "trigger happy," and "full or murderous rage" (which I guess is actually a phrase and not simply a predicate) don't slip through the digital cracks and wind up on the computer screens of emotionally tender Americans.
In many ways, the Word-o-Matic is similar to another data collection engine that has been up and running on the internet for a while now. We feel fine has been "harvesting human emotions" (eww) from "a large number of blogs" for more than three years. Its software identifies the phrases "I am feeling" and "I feel" in blog posts,grabs the full sentence from the blog, up to the first period, and then sends that info to a database where it is compiled and then displayed on an interactive Flash site as lots of little flourescent dots floating around in black space. Check it out.
The most intriguing thing about the Word-o-Matic is its insight into the emotions of the supporters of both candidates. The words chosen by McCain supporters are almost unanimously negative: "battered," "betrayed," "angry," "disgusted," "resigned," etc. "Resigned" and "worried" are some of the most popular sentiments among those people.
Obama supporters’ words are a mix of positives and collective breath-holding: "patriotic," "energized," "antsy," "jittery," "inspired," etc. "Hopfeul," "excited," and "optimistic" rank at the top of the charts for Obama supporters.
The two sides share one big feeling in common: anxiety. I know I can relate.
