“Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.”—Sally Mann “In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.”—August Sander When you’re feeling sad, the people around you probably know it. Moody playlists, slumped shoulders, drawn-out sighs—there are many ways we signal to the rest of the world when we’re having a …
Reporting on the August 9, 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown, David Carr concluded his August 17 piece for the New York Times by observing that "nothing much good was happening in Ferguson until it became a hashtag”. Following the story's rise and spread on Twitter, the protests in Missouri swiftly captured the news cycle in the U.S., and brought into focus the consequences …
Should the Mona Lisa be our most famous painting? Was Harry Potter destined to (repeatedly) sweep the globe? What would happen to everyone and everything famous if we ran the experiment that is our world over again? Find out why fame is truly unpredictable, how it lives and dies entirely in our social stories, and why “... there is no such thing as fate, only the story of …
Imagine commuting an hour to work, one way, grinding through miles of traffic to get from your suburban home to a desk job in the big city. Excited yet? Ok, now imagine that you lead a life of leisure traveling the world. You fly coast-to-coast to see a concert, soak in some culture, and drink fine wine. Does this lifestyle seem more appealing? Lets try to quantify the …
Today we're pleased to announce that our article “The Geography of Happiness: Connecting Twitter sentiment and expression, demographics, and objective characteristics of place” has been officially published by PLoS ONE. We wanted to tell you about one key piece we've added to the paper and an unusual new Twitter account we've created. After our three blog posts (which …
Total excitement people: our website hedonometer.org has gone live. We're measuring Twitter's happiness in real time. Please check it out! If you're still here, here's the blurb from the site's about page: Happiness: It’s what most people say they want. So how do we know how happy people are? You can’t improve or understand what you can’t measure. In a blow to happiness, …
How does food (or talking about food online) relate to how happy you are? This is part 3 of our series on the Geography of Happiness. Previously we've looked at how happiness varies across the United States (as measured from word frequencies in geotagged tweets), and then at how different socioeconomic factors relate to variations in happiness. Now we focus in on one particular …
Welcome back, onehappybird watchers! Wow, what a crazy week of coverage of our post about how happiness varies by city and state across the United States. Many, many people read, shared, and commented on the post, for which we are grateful. For the detailed explanation of the results, check out the full paper we recently submitted to PLoS ONE. A number of readers wondered how …
(Update: this work is now published at PLoS ONE) Is Disneyland really the happiest place on Earth?* How happy is the city you live in? We have already seen how the hedonometer can be used to find the happiest street corner in New York City, now it's time to let it loose on the entire United States. We plotted over 10 million geotagged tweets from 2011 (all our results are in …
Each morning we find ourselves in wide flung arms of drowsy possibilities. Cradled by the warm embrace of our beds, we begin our day, rebooted and rejuvenated. Having not eaten for a full eight hours, we can enjoy a guilt free breakfast, setting a blissful tone for the day. Last night's dreams of victory and triumph bolster our delusions of adequacy, preparing us to surmount …
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