. In the above video, he talks about The Whale Hunt as storytelling platform, as well as other storytelling platforms, including the very talk he’s giving as a storytelling platform.
Pop!Tech, which describes itself as “a one-of-a-kind conference, a community of remarkable people, and an ongoing conversation about science, technology and the future of ideas” was the venue for Harris’s fascinating talk. Pop!Tech introduces the video with these words:
Jonathan Harris is redefining the idea of what it means to tell a story. Take a ride through an arctic whale hunt and plunge headfirst into the feelings Harris finds running rampant in cyberspace as he describes what he calls “storytelling platforms.”
In addition to talking about the Whale Hunt, Harris discusses his We Feel Fine project, which:
… harvest[s] 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…
If you haven’t seen either of Harris’s projects or the video discussing them, you must. The video does fall apart a bit at the end with Harris’s experiment in turning the talk into a storytelling platform for the audience because participants weren’t miked and could barely be heard.