Mood study done on Twitter, West coast happier than East

By Ian on July 23, 2010, 01:10:46 PM. | 4 comments

Looks like researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard College were interested in mapping the mood of Twitter. It was found that the West coast is happier than the East cost.

How did they do it?

The researchers fed 300 million tweets into a system using ANEW (Affective Norms for English Words), which assigns a negative or positive emotional value to words. After generating that data, it was put onto a tweet density map, so the bigger the state is, the more tweets, and the color indicates mood (red means negative, green means positive), as you can see in the YouTube video above, which spans two days.

Pretty interesting, though there is some criticism according to Neowin, as tweets can be misinterpreted, like a tweet which says "I like the dark color of this painting" would be negative due to the word "dark." Neowin also says "But the researchers argue that this kind of bias is uniformly distributed over the country, like a background noise, which may affect the basic scale but not the relative positivity of mood."

(0) (0)

Categories: Internet, News

Tags: Twitter, real-time, research