fuck yeah cartography!

Mapping the mood: average negative (blue map, top) and positive (red map, bottom) feelings for each country (Image: Science/AAAS)

Twitter users who post messages such as “Yay, it’s the weekend!” might not be engaged in the most stimulating of conversations. But these kinds of tweets can provide sociologists with a map of people’s moods around the world.

Scott Golder and Michael Macy at Cornell University in New York gathered 509 million tweets from 2.4 million users in 84 different countries. They and analysed the messages using linguistic software that looks for positive or negative emotions within the text. They found that people tend to wake up in a good mood, which deteriorates as the day wears on. People tend to also be happier at the weekend, when the morning good-mood peak tends to be delayed by two hours, suggesting a lie-in. People are less positive during the winter, when the hours of daylight are shorter.

None of these results are particularly surprising, but Golder and Macy suggest that using global tweets allows them to confirm previous studies that only looked at small samples of American undergraduates who were not necessarily representative of the wider world. Traditional studies also require participants to recall their past emotions, whereas tweets can be gathered in real time.

(via abluegirl)