Hedonometrics

October 15, 2022 8:58 PM

How happy have the world's English-language retweets been? How about tweets in other languages? Tweets sorted by US state or city? What happiness-path do famous books take?

All calculated by the Hedonometer of the Computational Story Lab at the Vermont Complex Systems Center.

posted by clew (10 comments total)

I don't know what one does with this knowledge if one believes it to be an accurate representation. Save time on the exhausting experience of feeling literature? Set up warning buzzers to sound in the Cybersyn headquarters?
posted by clew at 9:01 PM on October 15, 2022

I thought that wave pattern over a period of years was interesting.

Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, we had each of these words scored on a nine point scale of happiness

I feel like there's something witty to say here about using Mechanical Turk to make something that measures happiness.
posted by aniola at 9:37 PM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

I wish they had state-by-state or city-by-city data for the last few years, as well (or from say 2018-2020).

And I am also interested to see that the pandemic is only barely visible in the Ukrainian retweets. Same with the Arabic, Indonesian, and Korean ones. But it's clear in the English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and German.

French has several visible events, including winning the world cup in July 2018. (It looks like the same size peak as Christmas, except it's in July. Ok then).
posted by nat at 11:30 PM on October 15, 2022

I'd like to see the city list kept up to date, expanded to more places than just the US, and cross-referenced with other metrics (eg income/wealth).
posted by aniola at 8:50 AM on October 16, 2022

29. Concord, NC
30. Concord, CA
posted by aniola at 8:55 AM on October 16, 2022

"I thought that wave pattern over a period of years was interesting."

The problem I noticed is the peaks all were based on holidays. Troughs are based on real events. I get that holidays are collective "joyful" moments, but it seems weird to count them against random occurrences.

On the other hand it almost provides a reason for holidays : the excuse to be happy, beyond the normal humdrum flat line.

Otherwise it's flatline and shit.
posted by symbioid at 11:22 AM on October 16, 2022

Oh dear. I was poking around to see if there was any access for asking ones own questions and got this:

Data and consulting

In addition to the raw data shown on this site, we are working to provide detailed analysis around brands, financial products, and US politics at Quokka Labs. More information is available on the website: quokkalabs.io.

posted by clew at 11:37 AM on October 16, 2022

symbioid, I mean the gentle curve over the entire decade or so of the timeline, not the sharp peaks and troughs of like christmas and soccer games and stuff.
posted by aniola at 12:05 PM on October 16, 2022

That gentle curve doesn’t seem visible in most of the other languages.
posted by nat at 12:28 PM on October 16, 2022

Can't judge the validity of regional tweets, but the results for books and movies are very questionable. Just for starters, does not show highest happiness at or near the end for stories with happy endings.
And, at least in novels, I doubt the validity of giving the word "mother" a happiness score and the word "widow" an unhappiness one.
posted by yinchiao at 10:06 PM on October 16, 2022 [1 favorite]