Category Archives: social phenomena

Question: Where is the happiest place in New York City?

Possible answers: Immediately adjacent to any hot dog stand. Madison Square Garden during moments of Linsanity. Tim Tebow’s new apartment building. No really though, let’s measure some stuff. Facts: (1) New York City is the most populous city in the … Continue reading

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Does QWERTY Affect Happiness?

Last week, news broke of a paper published in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review by Kyle Jasmin and Daniel Casasanto claiming to observe a positive relationship between the “right-handedness” of a word and its emotional valence. This is being called the … Continue reading

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Hedonometrics

Our paper “Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network: Hedonometrics and Twitter” appears in PLoS ONE this week. Their blog encourages you to tweet for the sake of science! Among other findings, in this paper we demonstrate that … Continue reading

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The Happiest Distribution

Do you laugh within your tweets? e.g. hahaha!!!  Here we show the number of times these different laugh species appear in tweets as a function of how many ha‘s they contain.  A few observations: Longer laughs are less frequent, and the frequency … Continue reading

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Happy and we know it

Science Magazine published a piece today framing twitter as a laboratory for research, Social Scientists Wade Into The Tweet Stream, including the above figure showing our hedonometer’s measure of happiness in 2011 as a function of day. Dodds was also … Continue reading

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Tweet Cartography

Six months of geo-located messages from Twitter’s gardenhose feed, roughly 20 million.  World, US, and NYC twitterific projections. PDF versions available here. Made possible by data ninjas Kameron Harris and Morgan Frank.

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Positivity of the English language

By analyzing a rather large collection of words (a good fraction of a trillion) we extracted from the New York Times, music lyrics, the Google Books project, and Twitter, we’ve found that English is inherently positive. The manuscript is here, … Continue reading

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Tweets and happiness.

Below is our first treatment of oodles of Twitter data, searching for basic patterns, happiness, and information levels. On the left, we have strong evidence that people really do tweet about what’s going on in their lives right now, at … Continue reading

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