Researchers Analyze Twitter To Find Happiest Parts of the United States

Nerval's Lobster writes "If you live in Hawaii, congratulations: according to a new study (PDF) by researchers at the University of Vermont, you live in the happiest state in the union — at least as far as Twitter sentiment is concerned. (Hat tip to The Atlantic for posting about the research.) The researchers — affiliated with the University's Department of Mathematics & Statistics, Complex Systems Center, Computational Story Lab, and Advanced Computing Core — collected 10 million geo-tagged Tweets from 373 urban areas across the United States in 2011 and ran them through a system designed to tag each on a scale from 1 (sad) to 9 (happy). According to the study, the five happiest states include Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Utah and Vermont; the five saddest are Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, Delaware and Georgia. In general, the West and Northeast seemed much happier than the Mid-Atlantic and South—with the exception of Florida, which shaded 'happier' than many of the surrounding states. While the researchers admitted their study's limitations, there are certainly a lot of opportunities for refining the model: for example, if Hawaii's status as a vacation state affects its rate of 'happy' Tweets, or if incorporating languages other than English into the dataset would affect the ultimate results."

Comments

Happy Coincidence

[bill_mcgonigle]

That the Univerity of Vermont researchers' methodology indicates that Vermont is among the happiest states.

Re:Red states, Blue states

[operagost]

I would find it interesting if that were actually the case. You think that New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, Maryland, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio are Republican-controlled states? And Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, and Florida are Democrat-controlled states? That's enough to take the words "general" out of it.