A group of mathematicians turned to Twitter to gauge global happiness for 2011, and it seems the last 12 months have not been humanity’s cheeriest. The team from the University of Vermont gathered 4.6 billion Twitter messages from Twitter’s 33 million users from around the world. Starting in September 2008, the mathematicians, led by Peter Dodds, assigned happiness grades to more than 10,000 common words with the help of volunteers who judged the words on a scale of 1 to 9. So a word such as “laughter” got an 8.5 and “food” had a 7.44 score. A word such as “terrorist” scored 1.3.
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Twitter as Mood Ring: We're in a Funk
Posted by: Rachelle Dragani December 22, 2011 11:13 AMA group of mathematicians turned to Twitter to gauge global happiness for 2011, and it seems the last 12 months have not been humanity’s cheeriest. The team from the University of Vermont gathered 4.6 billion Twitter messages from Twitter’s 33 million users from around the world. Starting in September 2008, the mathematicians, led by Peter Dodds, assigned happiness grades to more than 10,000 common words with the help of volunteers who judged the words on a scale of 1 to 9. So a word such as “laughter” got an 8.5 and “food” had a 7.44 score. A word such as “terrorist” scored 1.3.