Scientists analyze twitter to determine ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ spots of New York
Scientists have analyzed social media to perform social engineering analysis and report on the happiness levels in a region of New York.
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ScienceMag.org detail how a ” new study, researchers harvested every tweet that was geographically tagged to Manhattan and its surrounding boroughs during a 2-week period in April 2012. That was the easy part. The trick was deciphering the emotional content of those 604,000 utterances.”
The researchers noted that ” a large portion of tweets come with emoticons—for example, 🙂 and 🙁 for a smile or frown.”
Translating twitter into negative, positive, and neutral emotions were then projected into emotions as colors on a map of New York City – blue for positive, red for negative.
“…people tended to be happiest near green areas such as Central Park and unhappiest around transportation hubs such as Penn Station and the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel. But the fine-grained details are striking. The closer people were to Times Square, the happier they got. And the city’s mood had a daily rhythm, mirroring that of the individuals who live and work there. People’s feelings—both positive and negative—were muted in the morning and peaked around midnight.”
The happiest place in Manhattan was Fort Tryon Park.
Check out the article and map here
