How are we feeling? How can we tell? With so much of human communication taking place on social media, it seems a pretty good place to start. The Hedonometer measures our happiness based on one of these platforms: Twitter.  

It’s difficult to know exactly how many people use social media every month, but Twitter has somewhere around 336 million monthly active users worldwide. It’s a data-rich goldmine just waiting for us to use it to better understand our communal wellbeing.   

This is exactly what the Computational Story Lab has done. In 2013, this international group of mathematicians and computer scientists collaborated to create the Hedonometer. The Hedonometer measures happiness based on tweets published.  It looks at the words that people write… and then it basically calculates a temperature for all of those words. How do we feel today?

 

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