Scientists Create Software to Measure Happiness in Blog Posts and Tweets

Posted on August 1, 2009

Discovery News reports that Vermont scientists Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth have created a software program that analyzes blogs and tweets to ascertain how happy or sad people are. The scientists have also set up a website called We Feel Fine. Some of the findings based on data they have already collected is what you might expect. The happiest days were vacation days and the recent election and Obama's inauguration. An example of a sad day was the day Micheal Jackson died.

The consistently happiest days are, not surprisingly, vacation days and holidays. The overall happiest days of the last few years were election day (Nov. 4) and President Obama's inauguration (Jan. 20). On these days, people typically typed sentences with words like "pride" and "proud."
Some of the saddest days over the last few years have been the anniversaries of 9-11 and even the day before that solemn anniversary, Sept. 10. Michael Jackson's recent death also caused a drop in the average national happiness.
Analyzing blogs only measures the general climate of happiness across the entire United States (90 percent of the analyzed blogs were from the United States.) To find the level of happiness in your neck of the woods the researchers are now applying their software to 140-character Tweets.
"There are something like 1,000 tweets a minute," said Dobbs. "That's really a lot of data that we can analyze."

Tweets should give a good picture of overall mood. The researchers should be able to narrow down the mood by the hour or minute and not just the day.