VIBES: Visualizing changing emotional states in personal stories

April M. Wensel, Sara O. Sood

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

9 Scopus citations

Abstract

Online journals (blogs) provide not only an outlet for emotional self-expression, but also a space for social interaction and commiseration through the exchange of personal stories. However, the massive extent of the blogosphere can overwhelm users, restricting their ability to make meaningful connections to fellow bloggers. In this article, we present a system, VIBES, that extracts the important topics from a blog, measures the emotions associated with those topics, and generates a suite of visualizations of this information. Unlike previous research, which has focused on extracting global trends in opinion across the blogosphere, VIBES focuses on depicting the emotional trajectories of the storylines that persist throughout the life experiences of the individual. In user tests, a majority of participants agreed that the visualizations revealed the author's current emotional state and emotional development over time. VIBES has potential applications both in connecting users via shared emotional profiles on social networks, as well as facilitating self-reflection through private user status displays. It also offers a fresh perspective for studying emotions and modeling how they change over time, which has a number of applications in affective computing, including the creation of emotionally responsive interfaces.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2nd ACM International Workshop on Story Representation, Mechanism and Context, SRMC 08, Co-located with the 2008 ACM International Conference on Multimedia, MM'08
Pages49-56
Number of pages8
DOIs
StatePublished - 2008
Event2nd ACM International Workshop on Story Representation, Mechanism and Context, SRMC 08, Co-located with the 2008 ACM International Conference on Multimedia, MM'08 - Vancouver, BC, United States
Duration: Oct 27 2008Oct 31 2008

Publication series

NameMM'08 - Proceedings of the 2008 ACM International Conference on Multimedia, with co-located Symposium and Workshops

Other

Other2nd ACM International Workshop on Story Representation, Mechanism and Context, SRMC 08, Co-located with the 2008 ACM International Conference on Multimedia, MM'08
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVancouver, BC
Period10/27/0810/31/08

Keywords

  • Affective Computing
  • Narrative
  • Summarization
  • Visualization
  • Weblogs

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Software

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