Happiness base on Tweets

Seeing this is the week where we are visualizing data, I figured this article is relevant to the second project.  In The Atlantic article, it reports a study that shows data visualization of happiness via tweets.  The tweets are tracked based on specific emotional words used in particular locations.  In this map, the red states are much more happier than the blue ones and gray states are neutral.  I'd like to point out that the map is not a political affiliation of the two major government parties running the country which was not pointed out by the author or the study.

As you can see, Hawaii is the happiest state and Lousiana is the saddest.  Also, broken down by city, Napa, CA is the happiest city and Beaumont, TX was the saddest city.  The author points out several trends based on the study.  Most of the poorer states are in the blue status and the richer states in the red.  The words use in the study were profanities like shit, ass, bitch, stupid, sucks and acronyms like lol and haha and positive adjectives like nice, funny and amazing.  This is somewhat misleading because the study does not take into account the context of the words used.  Phrases like "Aw Shit, just won the lotto, suck it, stupid job" would use three words that are deemed unhappy by the study's standard and "Nice, my dog just threw up his food on my friend's shoe" would be deemed happy.

Another flaw that the author points out are how cultures would deem happiness.  According to the study, Norwegian ancestry people are much more happier than African Americans.  This seems all relative.  One major thing I would have to agree with the author is the exclusion of the Spanish language.  Hispanics and Latinos are the largest rising demographic in the US but their voice was ignored because their language did not fall into the study.  According to the author, the study's findings correlation with nationwide surveys done by the Gallup polls that measured happiness but with the statistics found in the Twitter experiment, it just seems flawed.

This was a great example of how data can be represented in visualization and is open to interpretation much like the projects presented in class.  It's valuable information even if it's a little askewed.