Now online: the Dow Jones Index of Happiness
Total excitement people: our website hedonometer.org has gone live. We’re measuring Twitter’s happiness in real time. Please check it out! If you’re still here, here’s the blurb from the site’s about...
View ArticleNow Published: The Geography of Happiness
Today we’re pleased to announce that our article “The Geography of Happiness: Connecting Twitter sentiment and expression, demographics, and objective characteristics of place” has been officially...
View ArticleHow does movement influence your daily happiness?
Imagine commuting an hour to work, one way, grinding through miles of traffic to get from your suburban home to a desk job in the big city. Excited yet? Ok, now imagine that you lead a life of leisure...
View ArticleHow our storytelling nature means we deeply misunderstand the mechanics of...
Should the Mona Lisa be our most famous painting? Was Harry Potter destined to (repeatedly) sweep the globe? What would happen to everyone and everything famous if we ran the experiment that is our...
View ArticleMoose on the Loose!
Note: a version of this post was given by the author for Invocation at the UVM College of Engineering & Mathematical Sciences graduation ceremony, Flynn Theatre, May 18, 2014. A few weeks ago—on...
View ArticleThe Ferguson protests: Quantifying state-level sentiment on Twitter
Reporting on the August 9, 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown, David Carr concluded his August 17 piece for the New York Times by observing that “nothing much good was happening in Ferguson until it...
View ArticleHedonometer 2.0
Over the summer of 2014, we have worked very hard to bring many new pieces to our Hedonometer, and we’re pleased to tell you about what we’ve done, and where we’re going next. All along, one of the...
View ArticleExploring Hedonometer 2.0’s global Twitter time series
In this post, we’ll run through the basic features of our new interactive happiness time series for Twitter. We’ll first use words and pictures to orient your experience, and then finish with a video...
View ArticleHedonometer 2.0: Measuring happiness and using word shifts
With our Hedonometer, we’re measuring how a (very capable) individual might feel when reading a large text—a day’s worth of tweets from New York City, the first chapter of Moby Dick, or the music...
View ArticleThe Happiest Character on Seinfeld was …
… Kramer! Ohhh YEAHHHHH! Whether he was analyzing underwear performance (“My boys need a house!”), advising a friend on marriage (“Is it alright if I use the bathroom now?”), or unabashedly offering...
View ArticleWhere does Twitter stand on Climate Change?
There is an overwhelming consensus among scientists that anthropogenic climate change is real. However, politicians often benefit from disagreeing with this consensus, and media coverage tends to...
View ArticleNovel data assimilation improvements for limited observations
The availability of data on the current state of Earth’s atmosphere/ocean/land system continues to improve. As the state-of-the-art weather models and supercomputing power allow for higher resolution...
View ArticleOn Positivity and Politicians: Polling for Sentiment on Twitter
For many, social media has become the preferred outlet to profess opinions and express personal endorsements for candidates. Twitter, being public and widely used, offers a potentially powerful way to...
View ArticleOn Positivity and Politicians: Linking Candidate Annotated Debate Transcripts...
Social media’s rise has changed the election process. Subtle social cues on Facebook increase voter turnout, supporters of politicians buy fake followers, and regular people have the opportunity to...
View ArticleTransitions in Climate and Energy Discourse Between Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy
Climate change is real, and that’s just science. But if we aren’t feeling climate change on a day-to-day basis, then how do we know it’s really happening? The problem is especially challenging...
View ArticleFinding the shapes of games
Each game is a story If you pay much attention to news of any kind, it’s almost impossible to go a day without hearing about some sporting event going on in the world. Annual competitions like the...
View ArticleThe Shapes of Stories
Stories help us encode and understand our collective existence, underpin cultures, and help frame the possible. Describing the ecology of all human stories is an essential scientific enterprise. With...
View ArticleConnecting Every Bit of Knowledge
What is the shape of all knowledge? How has knowledge grown over time? Can we anticipate ways in which knowledge will grow? Knowledge is certainly hierarchically structured but it’s also richly...
View ArticleA Bird’s-Eye View of #WomensMarch
On January 21st, 2017, the Women’s March on Washington gathered enormous crowds in collective protest of the newly inaugurated President of the United States, Donald Trump. Meanwhile on Twitter, people...
View ArticleWhat do your Instagram photos reveal about your mental health?
“Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.” — Sally Mann “In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.” — August Sander When you’re feeling...
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