Kevin Hu & Travis Rich built a site called GIFGIF, which aims to crowd tag animated gifs with various emotions. From GIFGIF’s website: “An animated gif is a magical thing. It contains the power to convey emotion, empathy, and context in a subtle way that text or emoticons simply can’t. GIFGIF is a project to capture that magic with quantitative methods. Our goal is to create a tool that lets people explore the world of gifs by the emotions they evoke, rather than by manually entered tags.”

For this project, Kevin and I are building a map tool, along the lines of What We Watch, so that people can explore GIFGIF’s current dataset to see which gifs are most representative of certain emotions in each country.

GIFGIF’s data will soon be made publicly available through an API.