A group of researchers from Northeastern and Harvard universities have gathered enough data from Twitter to give us all a snapshot of how U.S. residents feel throughout a typical day or week.
Not only did they analyze the sentiments we collectively expressed in 300 million tweets over three years against a scholarly word list, these researchers also mashed up that data with information from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Google Maps API and more. What they ended up with was a fascinating visualization showing the pulse of our nation, our very moods as they fluctuate over time.
The researchers have put this information into density-preserving cartograms, maps that take the volume of tweets into account when representing land area. In other words, in areas where there are more tweets, those spots on the map will appear larger than they do in real life.
It will surprise almost no one to learn that there is a general mood slump mid-day and mid-week, when we are most likely to be at work. Our tweets show that we�re happiest in the early morning and late evening; during the week, our mood tends to peak on Sunday morning.
Less predictable, perhaps, is the fact that West Coast tweets were �happier� than tweets from the East Coast. Although West Coast Twitter users expressed emotions in the same cycles as the East Coast users (with a three-hour gap, of course, because of time zone differences), the West Coasters didn�t dip as low in mood as the East Coasters by a significant margin.
For the infographic fans among you, here�s a lovely visualization of some of the data displayed:
You can also check out a cool video below that illustrates how Twitter mood expressions change over the course of a day in the U.S.
We�re pretty fascinated by visualizations like these; what other data or topics would you like to see these researchers tackle next? What use do you think we could get out of the current information they�ve generated?
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