Tone mapping

This blog tends to mostly sunny, with some light showers and the occasional storm cloud. Other blogs, such as one of my favorites by my friend Michael Wahrman, are much darker and more sardonic, with refreshingly dyspeptic views of humanity and its foibles.

Sometimes you are in the mood for a certain kind of take on reality. Maybe you’re in a foul mood and you need a little uplift, or perhaps at other times you feel the need for a little ballast in the form of a well aimed cutting satire.

I wonder whether it would be possible, using advanced techniques of machine learning, trained by the vast crowd-sourced corpus of the Web, to give a color or tone to any given post, so that a prospective reader could see at a glance what he or she might be in for.

I myself would be very interested to see such a “view from 50,000 feet” of my own blog, to gain some high level perspective on how my own mood and attitude may have changed here and there over these last months and years. It would be interesting to try to correlate those tonal shifts with events in my own life — or the lives of the people I love.

Generalizing, maybe we could all apply such a tool, if it existed, to our own emails, posts and tweets, to gain some insight into our own ever-shifting internal landscape of emotion over time, and perhaps learn a little more about ourselves, and how we cope with the winds of change in our lives.

One thought on “Tone mapping”

  1. I love this idea. However, each map would have to be very individual. For example, Barack Obama winning each election would be a happy happy color for me, and a sad sad color for someone else. Or, a medical article on miscarriage could be neutral for one person, positive for someone else (perhaps a medical professional excited about the research discussed) and dismal for yet another person.

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