WIKIMEDIA, HEINRICH BOLL STIFTUNG
A website launched yesterdat (April 30) indexes happiness on Twitter by tracking individual words in user tweets. Researchers have compiled happiness scores for every day since September 2008. The day of the Boston Marathon bombings last month, April 15, ranked the lowest on the scale of any day yet tracked.
“Reporters, policymakers, academics—anyone—can come to the site and see population-level responses to major events,” Chris Danforth, one of the index’s creators and a professor at the computational story lab at the University of Vermont (UVM), said in a statement.
The index is based on strategies and computer programs developed for a study UVM researchers published in 2011. The researchers gathered the most commonly used words from Google books, The New York Times, music lyrics, and ...
