this is a private blog for my design students and assorted other survivors. Tro blemakers all
this is a private blog for my design students and assorted other survivors. Tro blemakers all.
this is a private blog for my design students and assorted other survivors. Tro blemakers all.
this is a private blog for my design students and assorted other survivors. Tro blemakers all.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Pulse of the Nation: U.S. Mood throughout the Day Inferred from Twitter



The scientific study "Pulse of the Nation: U.S. Mood throughout the Day Inferred from Twitter" [ccs.neu.edu] illustrates the varying mood in the U.S., as inferred after analyzing over 300 million tweets that were created over the course of the day.

Various density-preserving cartograms and a time-animated video were produced to capture important large-scale trends.

The researchers analyzed all public tweets posted between September 2006 and August 2009, and filtered those whom orginated from a US location and those that contained words included in the psychological word-rating system called Affective Norms for English Words, resulting in a collection of 300 million tweets.

Through a natural language processing algorithm called Sentiment Analysis, each tweet was assigned a mood score based on the number of positive or negative words it contained. Out of the resulting data, they then calculated the average mood score of all the users living in a state hour by hour which formed the basis of a series of time-varying mood maps.

One of the interesting patterns shows how the West Coast mood follows the same pattern as the East, with a 3-hour time-zone delay, indicating that Each Coast experiences the same time-dependent swings. Weekends were observed to be happier than weekdays.

The peak in the overall tweet mood score is observed on Sunday mornings, and the trough occurs on Thursday evenings.

This is the nexus where informatics flourishes - where graphic design and statistical information collide. On a more philosophical note - is
there something here that is rather unsettling about all of this, something which is setting my radar off ? hmmmn ....


9 comments:

ani said...

effectively, the study measured the the usefulness of twitter(? ..)

Radio Free Pescado said...

ya your wicked right !

zarine said...

The only thing I find disturbing is that a lot of people in the U.S. aren't happy. The entire country seems depressed.

Radio Free Pescado said...

yes it does.

I also find the compulsion to constantly share meaningless trivia with virtual strangers (pun intended) horrifying.

Where does that urge come from ? It's seems akin to something like - screaming just as you pee from behind a bush. It's as if everyone needs an audience to validate their existence ?

Radio Free Pescado said...

what no pithy comments Wes ?
you Twit, err Mumby twat. you twope, to twipe or not to twipe .. never mind

Wesley said...

Twitter serves the exact same attention-seeking function as your blog or any other blog out there, only it's in a micro-format, hence the term 'micro-blogging'. Sure, preteen girls now use it to express their love for Justin Beiber and announce play-by-plays of their latest slumber parties, but you can just as easily find full-length write ups about both those topics on any full featured wordpress or blogspot blog. Just like a full featured blog, twitter gives users the ability to express their opinion/views on something - may it be the latest movie, news outbreak, whatever - only, a) it's much quicker and to the point and b) rather than visiting a blog/site individually and seeing if anything new has been added, twitter outputs updates in real time and offers applications on both mobile and desktop platforms, keeping people up to date at all times, if they so choose to be. Similarly, it can also be a place to express ones feelings on that day or to share an account of what they did - plant some fall bulbs, construct an impeccable meal, you name it!

Your argument regarding an 'audience' seems to disconnect from the fact that your blog, like a twitter, has an audience, most of which I can bet you is from random google-search findings and unintentional stumble-upons. So, like twitter, you have eyes and ears reading everything you put up, even if you didn't intend it to be that way. Do you think those people have any more caring for the pictures of your flowers because it's on a 'blogspot'? If you had posted your garden on twitter, would it make it any less spectacular or meaningful? On twitter, the people that would see your flowers - had you hypothetically posted them there - would be the ones that choose to follow you because they have a genuine interest in you and/or the content you have to offer. If you choose to limit your followers to only a few personal friends, you can do so by making it private - in which case, you would have complete control over who sees the content you post.

Do I agree with people tweeting about their latest findings from their last nose-digging adventure? Absolutely not. Do I feel that twitter serves a genuine and *gasp* productive purpose? Absolutely. If you'd like - though we've already discussed this one-on-one - I would gladly re-list and explain how twitter acts to serve society in a productive and functional manner.

Simply put, the 'useless information' and 'attention seeking' tendencies of a twitter is just as present in a blog, only twitter users take themselves less seriously - thus, worrying less about whether or not people will be impressed by what they post.

I will now conclude this by proposing that everyone follow me on twitter. NOW!

Radio Free Pescado said...

I don't know, seems like it might be time to do a twitter intervention ...

leplumagegris said...

I'd love to see what you would post if you ever made yourself a twitter, Sir.

Radio Free Pescado said...

Sure twitter's world wide, nearly instantaneous and user friendly - jeez ... it's even free .... but mes amis .... it's only a molecule thick, and if that doesn't tell you all you really need to know about it....

Try this .... twitter is to interpersonal communications -what air guitar is to music ...