Twitter Mood

The Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard have been fooling around with visualization of social network state, like happiness/unhappiness:

Sune Lehmann, Mood, twitter, and the new shape of America

How to construct the mood map
Since many twitter users list their location, we’ve assigned every tweet in our (massive) database to a US county and extracted their mood. This allows us to average over tweets and plot the mood of the US as a function of geography (and time). However, since the US is unevenly populated, the resulting maps are boring since only a few counties (the centers of cities) contain most of the tweets (not too many tweets in Ellsworth, Nebraska yet).

Luckily, brilliant people have come up with a cool way of solving this problem using a technique called density equalizing maps³ (or cartograms). The idea here is simple: warp the map in such a way that certain features of shape are conserved, but in such a way that the (population) density becomes the same everywhere. The resulting maps look like something from an alternate universe and allow us to show the US mood much more clearly.

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In the video, green corresponds to a happy mood and red corresponds to a grumpier state of mind. The area of each state is scaled according to the number of tweets originating in that state. Note how the East Coast is consistently 3 hours ahead of the West Coast, so when we’re sleeping in Boston, the Californians are tweeting away. It’s also interesting that better weather seems to make you happier (or rather, that better weather is correlated with happier tweets): Florida and California seems to be consistently in a better mood than the remaining US. Also note how New Mexico and Delaware behave very differently from their neighbors. Full results, individual maps, and a high-res poster can be found on the dedicated Twitter Mood website.

In you consider this in light of other work, like Pete Warden’s Seven Regions Of The US, I am not surprised at the way that unhappiness seems clustered in certain sections.