The Optimist Conspectus Aims to Catalog and Map Optimism

April 28, 2009 - PRLog -- The Optimist Conspectus announces the launch of a public website at http://www.theoptimistconspectus.com - a public home for the study of global optimism.

The project was borne of a collective observation that there is a great deal of optimism in society at the moment, even as we are witnessing massive economic turmoil, warfare and significant threats to our planet in the form of environmental destruction and disease.

The ultimate goal for the project is to create a set of data visualizations - a map of optimism - utilizing the most frequently-used words from the submissions to paint a picture of what it is that people are optimistic about, akin to two recent New York Times features:

Map of Popular Super Bowl Words Used on Twitter: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/02/02/sports/20090202_superbowl_twitter.html
Inaugural Words - 1789 to the Present: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/17/washington/20090117_ADDRESSES.html

Effectively, The Optimist Conspectus is framed around responses to the deceptively-simple question: What is it that you are optimistic about?

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The Optimist Conspectus is simply a survey of optimism; a series of answers to a deceptively-simple question: What are you optimistic about?

It bears no commercial viability. It is a series of snapshots that aim to paint a larger picture.