As a grad student trying to understand the emotional content of some unreadably large collection of texts, a typical night can often go something like this: You’re up late at night planning a new research study, thinking about trying some of this fancy sentiment-based text analysis. You resort to your favorite search engine with the query “sentiment analysis package python.” We …
How do we quantify the well-being of a population in real time? Traditionally, we’ve done so with a mixture of key economic indicators, from GDP to consumer confidence indices. But are people happy? Do they believe their lives—their personal stories—are going well? Do they have hope for the future? More than 2 billion people use social media such as Twitter, …
... Kramer! Ohhh YEAHHHHH! Whether he was analyzing underwear performance (“My boys need a house!”), advising a friend on marriage (“Is it alright if I use the bathroom now?”), or unabashedly offering his honest opinion (“You just need a nose job!”), Jerry Seinfeld’s awkwardly outspoken neighbor brought the funny. Inspired by writer Larry David’s real-life neighbor Kenny …
Over the summer of 2014, we have worked very hard to bring many new pieces to our Hedonometer, and we're pleased to tell you about what we've done, and where we're going next. All along, one of the central goals for the Hedonometer has been to provide a new instrument for society's dashboard, one that measures population-level happiness in real time from …