Pulse of the Nation

An interesting use of Twitter tweets to track the mood of the country.

Is the west coast happier?

From New Scientist...

America, are you happy? The emotional words contained in hundreds of millions of messages posted to the Twitter website may hold the answer.

Researchers at Northeastern University in Boston have found that these "tweets" suggest that the west coast is happier than the east coast, and across the country happiness peaks each Sunday morning, with a trough on Thursday evenings. The team calls their work the "pulse of the nation".

[The team looked at] 300 million tweets, each of which was awarded a mood score based on the number of positive or negative words it contained. For example, "diamond", "love" and "paradise" indicate happiness, whereas "funeral", "rape" and "suicide" are negative. "Dentist" is fairly neutral. The researchers calculated the average mood score of all the users living in a state hour by hour and so created a timed series of mood maps. They morphed the maps so that the size of each county reflected the number of Twitter users living there.

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