Happiest State?
An assignment for my “Intro to Data Science” course was to estimate which state was “happiest” based on twitter sentiment analysis. Words such as “adore, admire, fun, love, reassure” score positive, words such as “despair, harmful, mediocrity, upset” score negative.
I analyzed 300,000 tweets and came up with the following result. (Note: Darker red means happier sentiment.) Hawaii was the clear winner, but UT-WY-CO-KS-OK form a very strong region of positive sentiment tweets.
In my analysis, LA and AL were the only two states that had a negative twitter sentiment, meaning, on average, there were more negative sentiment words than positive.
Nice work Walter, I’m also on the Data Science course, and like your visualisation of the first assignment – can i ask how you did it?
Omkar,
Thanks for the note! I used the online state mapping tool found here. It is not an efficient way to do it, since the data must be entered by hand. But, for the scope of the assignment, it worked well.
http://illuminations.nctm.org/ActivityDetail.aspx?ID=151
Here’s a study National Geographic just reported on:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/05/130529-saddest-happiest-states-twitter-texas-maine-hawaii-california/