If you're sad and you know it, don't cry a tear. Tweet instead!
A new study by researchers at the Vermont Complex Systems Center analyzed 80 million words from more than 10 million geotagged tweets in 2011 to find America's saddest city: Beaumont, Texas.
Using that list, researchers then collected tweets from more than 300 separate cities and towns across the United States and created an algorithm to assess how frequently "happy" words occurred vs. how frequently "sad" words occurred in different places. For example, people in Napa were much more likely to tweet the word "hope" than were their counterparts living along the Gulf Coast.
"The differences in the words people used told us a lot about the cities themselves," saysLewis Mitchell, a mathematician and the study's lead author. "Essentially we were able to create a geography of happiness." [...]
"The people at the bottom of our list live in states that are more socioeconomically depressed and where more natural disasters occur," he says. "There are higher rates of poverty, and the median incomes are lower."
This might explain why places like Beaumont and Shreveport, Louisiana, have sadder tweets.
Melody Kramer of National Geographic has the post: Link
Yet, they have twitter accounts! Poverty in the US is defined differently than the rest of the world.
I'm suspicious of the study...the selection of the 300 separate cities and towns could bias things, as could his interpretation of the connotations of some words. ("Hope" could be an indicator of many negative things. "My only hope is..." or "I have lost all hope..." or even "I hope I win the lottery" which is a pretty desparate statement... Plus, sarcasm and cultural differences around the country would mess with his algorithms.) Still, I'm sure *I* would be less happy in Texas, than in just about any other state....