Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-29-2013
Abstract
We conduct a detailed investigation of correlations between real-time expressions of individuals made across the United States and a wide range of emotional, geographic, demographic, and health characteristics. We do so by combining (1) a massive, geo-tagged data set comprising over 80 million words generated in 2011 on the social network service Twitter and (2) annually-surveyed characteristics of all 50 states and close to 400 urban populations. Among many results, we generate taxonomies of states and cities based on their similarities in word use; estimate the happiness levels of states and cities; correlate highly-resolved demographic characteristics with happiness levels; and connect word choice and message length with urban characteristics such as education levels and obesity rates. Our results show how social media may potentially be used to estimate real-time levels and changes in population-scale measures such as obesity rates. © 2013 Mitchell et al.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Mitchell L, Frank MR, Harris KD, Dodds PS, Danforth CM. The geography of happiness: Connecting twitter sentiment and expression, demographics, and objective characteristics of place. PloS one. 2013 May 29;8(5):e64417.
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0064417