slides: New England’s Happiest States According To Twitter

Friday, February 22, 2013

Elizabeth R. Koh, GoLocalProv Contributor

How happy is your state, and how does it rank in New England? Researchers at the University of Vermont, Burlington have crafted a new picture of happiness, using the millions of data points created by Twitter.

The team at the Vermont Complex Systems Center analyzed millions of geotagged public tweets across the United States, assessing the positivity and negativity of common words in tweets to compute the average happiness of all those tweeters. The study looked at more than 300 metro areas nationwide--the combined cities made up each state's final happiness ranking.

Three of the five happiest states — Hawaii, Utah and Nevada — hailed from the West, but Southern states generally bottomed out on the list, with Louisiana and Mississippi leading up the rear.

Want to know how New England states placed? What do our tweets say about us? Keep reading to find out how researchers compiled the list. And tweet it out.

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Methodology

Counting tweets

The UVM analysis of tweets was based on how many happy or unhappy words were tweeted. For example, words like "rainbow" topped the list of most happy words, while swear words were the most negative.

Those words that showed up the most in a state's tweets had the most influence on its overall mood. New England fell pray to a serious amount of Twitter profanity, which had much to do with the lower rankings of several NE states nationally.