this project was inspired by how consistantly negative the news can seem at times, and how sometimes it seems like those ending segments entitled as "making a difference", etc., seem contrived and scheduled. i wanted to display the good and the bad about the news straight, side by side, without contrivance.
i used a javascript API to interface with google news, a fantastic aggregate news site (the news you see on the left is up-to-date, pulled off the site). and that lead to the most interesting thing about this project: coming up with the keyword searches (you can see the keywords i used above each section, which is populated with stories matching those keywords).
stories weren't tagged "depressing" or "happy", so I had to think up/find keywords in stories that signaled whether they were good or bad. i think i picked pretty good ones, but due to the ambiguity of the english language and the unpredictability of humans, if you look at the lists closely enough, you will find happy stories in the negative lists, and sad ones in the positive lists.
and no matter how hard i tried, i couldn't find any consistant way that these little false positives popped up. i think that says more than anything else.
possible future project: count the distribution of common words in "positive" and "negative" stories