America's Emotions via Twitter
If you want to see how someone's day is going, chances are you can check their Twitter and get a pretty good idea. That said, aside from your own personal friends, it's really impossible to get a serious feel for the rest of the world's affect (look it up) at any given time... Until now. Computer scientist Alan Mislove from Northeastern University and his colleauges in Boston have done a study that finds that the west coast is happier than the east coast, and across the country happiness peaks each Sunday morning, and hits a low on Thursday evenings. The study is called 'Pulse of the Nation'.
Mislove took all public tweets between September 2006 and August 2009, filtered out users from outside the US (and those with no location listed), then filtered them against a psychological word-rating system called Affective Norms for English Words. ANEW ranks lower scoring words as negative and higher ones as positive. Positive words like 'love', 'diamond', and 'paradise' have higher scores, while negative words like 'funeral', 'rape', and 'suicide' have lower ones. He then took those scores, calculated the average mood of all the users in a state hour by hour, and plotted the scores on a 'mood map'. The mood map transforms every hour based on how many users in a state are tweeting, and how that state is tweeting (happy or sad). The result was the video above, a 24-hour map of the emotional ups and downs of Twitter.
The dope part about this study is that you can see where you fit in as a regular Twitter user. Weekends are usually fairly happy, while the middle of the week is pure drudgery. Also, the West Coast's overall happiness compared to that of the East Coast is dumbfounding. Even crazier is the fact that the Midwest seems to always be somewhat unhappy (sorry Detroit). It's interesting to see such a wide base of data being portrayed so simply. If you want to see an extended write-up with more infographics, click here. Other wise, check out the video and see how your mood fits into the pulse of the nation...
