Jonathan Harris

Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art, and storytelling, Jonathan Harris designs systems to explore and explain the human world.
 
Jonathan was born August 27, 1979 in Shelburne, Vermont. Growing up in Vermont and New York City, he kept detailed sketchbooks, filled with watercolors, drawings, writings, ticket stubs, pasted dead insects, and other mementos collected from his life. He studied Computer Science at Princeton University under Brian Kernighan, where his senior thesis was a program that gathers and clusters similar news articles.
 
At Princeton he founded Troubadour Magazine, a publication that uses personal travel narratives to explore world cultures, with themed issues like "Empire", "Evil-Doers", and "Pirates". He also cofounded Oral Fixation Mints, a breath mint company, for which he designed mint tins and other paraphernalia.
 
In 2004 he received Italy’s Fabrica Fellowship from Benetton, to join 40 other young artists for a year’s work in non-traditional art, near Venice. At Fabrica, Jonathan created the award-winning sites 10x10, which automatically chooses the top 100 words and pictures in the world every hour based on what’s happening in the news, and WordCount, which presents the 88,000 most frequently used English words, arranged side by side as one very long sentence.
 
After Fabrica, Jonathan worked as the first design director of Daylife, a global news service. At Daylife he created Universe, an exploration of modern mythology which attempts to suggest new constellations for today’s night sky.
 
His other projects include We Feel Fine, which uses large-scale blog analysis to study human emotion; Lovelines, which explores human desire, Phylotaxis, which presents the intersection of science and culture; and justcurio.us, an anonymous question and answer system. In late 2006, he was commissioned by Yahoo! to create a Time Capsule, which was open for one month online, in ten languages, and whose contents were then projected for three consecutive nights onto the ancient canyon walls of the Jemez pueblo, in New Mexico.
 
In May 2007, Jonathan traveled to Barrow, Alaska to document an Eskimo whale hunt with a sequence of 3,214 photographs taken at five-minute intervals, spanning seven days.
 
Most recently, he was commissioned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art to create a new work for their Design and the Elastic Mind show. Out of this came I Want You To Want Me, an interactive installation that explores people’s search for love and self in the world of online dating.
 
The winner of two 2005 Webby Awards, his work has also been recognized by AIGA, Ars Electronica, ID Magazine, and the State of Vermont, and has been exhibited at Le Centre Pompidou (Paris) and at MoMA (New York), in addition to numerous other venues in Austria, France, Holland, Italy, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Spain, and the UK. His work has been featured by a number of publications, including CNN, Reuters, BBC, The Guardian, USA Today, Voice of America, NPR, Creative Review, Metropolis, and Wired. He has lectured at TED, MoMA, the National Academy of Sciences, Parson’s School of Design, Princeton and Stanford Universities, and at Google.
 
An organizer of Princeton University’s Art of Science Competition, he also advises the clothing company Distilled Spirit and the online marketplace Etsy.com.
 
He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
 
Watch his TED Talk. Read Telling stories using data: An interview with Jonathan Harris. Watch Jonathan Harris, Internet Anthropologist and I Want You To Want Me.