Every colored cell is a day I wrote something — a journal entry, a morning freewrite, a to-do list, a reflection. The color represents the emotional tone of that day's writing, measured by sentiment analysis. Darker cool tones (violet, plum) indicate negative sentiment; warm sand is neutral; greens and teals indicate positive sentiment.
The source material is a personal Obsidian vault — a collection of markdown files used as a daily journal, creative writing notebook, and thinking space. Entries range from a few words to over a thousand, spanning nearly three years. The gaps are as telling as the entries: weeks of silence, bursts of daily writing, seasonal rhythms.
Each entry is scored using VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner), a lexicon-based sentiment analysis tool tuned for social media and informal text. It produces a compound score from −1 (most negative) to +1 (most positive). The rolling average in the sparkline uses a 14-day weighted window to smooth daily noise into broader emotional trends.
Sentiment analysis reads surface-level language, not meaning. Irony, sarcasm, and complex emotional states are invisible to it. A difficult day processed with hopeful language reads as positive; a joyful day described flatly reads as neutral. Think of this as emotional weather, not emotional truth — patterns in the atmosphere, not the landscape beneath.