Global Emotions

A weather system of attention.

The world view. An aggregate visual interpretation of available public signals. — The world view. An aggregate field from the instrument’s archive.

From a place
to a field.

Public search and news signals enter an authored affective model. Color gives its interpretation a visible form, with a location and date attached to each record.

Change
the scope.

The instrument offers country, territory, and regional views alongside a world aggregate. Each field belongs to a particular scope; no view stands for every person within it.

A location view. Scope is identified by its location code. — The location selector connects a place to its available records.

Each day leaves
a record.

Fields gather into a dated archive. A reading can be revisited in its original context: where it came from, when it was generated, and which model produced it.

Dated fields preserve the instrument’s interpretations over time. — The daily archive preserves changes in the instrument’s visual field.

Project details

Period: 2026–ongoing
Scope: Locations / world aggregate
Form: Instrument
Status: Inactive

About the project

Global Emotions interprets public search and news signals through an authored affective model, producing a daily visual field for each available location.

The work extends the inquiry of American Emotions beyond one country. Fields accumulate into an archive of the instrument’s interpretations of public signals, not a direct record of how everyone in a place felt.

System

Input

Search trends and headline context
Traffic and publication-time weighting

Output

Authored emotional classification
A color field for an available location
A dated archive record

The published method maps signals into a taxonomy of 169 emotions with color and valence–arousal–dominance coordinates. Its categories and weights are choices made within the model.

The affect label describes the model’s interpretation. Search pressure is a separate attention-intensity readout; it should not be read as a measure of how strongly a population feels an emotion.

Reading a field

Use the location code, record date, and model version together. A US-NY field is a New York state view, not a national reading. WORLD is an aggregate view. Neither represents every person within its scope.

On September 24, 2026, the location selector listed 177 places, including country and territory views, U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and a world aggregate. A listed location does not guarantee a field for every day.

The archive is organized by day. The Today view may show the latest available dated field; check its generated timestamp rather than assuming it was produced today. An absent record provides no basis for inferring calm, neutrality, or zero activity.

Instrument record