Want to visit the happiest place in New York City? You might soon be able to, thanks to tweet maps that can tell you how people are feeling in various parts of a city.
Twitter feeds have already been used to map the mood across America. of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and colleagues did a similar but finer-grained analysis on the scale of a city.
They collected hundreds of thousands of tweets sent from the New York metropolitan area between 13 April and 26 April 2012.
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They started with a subset of tweets that had emoticons such as :-( or :-).
Their software checked the words in each of these tweets and classified the tweet as positive or negative. It then checked its decision against the emoticon in the tweet to verify and fine-tune its classification system. Once trained, the software then analysed the entire set of 603,954 tweets.
Penal code
鈥淭he degree to which we could actually characterize sentiment was surprising,鈥� says Bar-Yam.
For example, the map revealed that Maspeth Creek at the border of Queens and Brooklyn is beset with bad feelings. The creek connects to the infamous Newtown Creek, which the US Environmental Protection Agency has called So pollution could be influencing how people feel near Maspeth Creek.
The other source of negative sentiment was Rikers Island, the world鈥檚 largest penal colony. 鈥淭here are 14,000 inmates and 20,000 staff on average,鈥� says Bar-Yam. 鈥淭here are also visitors. One might expect negative sentiment from many of them.鈥�
Transportation hubs like Penn Station and traffic bottlenecks such as the entrance to Brooklyn Bridge also seemed to upset people, as reflected in their tweets.
On a happier note, public spaces such as Central Park made people glow. 鈥淭he happiest was Fort Tryon Park, which is incredibly beautiful,鈥� says Bar-Yam.
Down with school
There were temporal trends too. 鈥淭he saddest was Hunter College High School,鈥� says Bar-Yam. 鈥淚t turns out that we collected data just after they came back from vacation.鈥�
of Northeastern University in Boston says that using Twitter for such analysis has positives and negatives.
On one hand, it gives researchers access to a large number of users and a diversity of topics. On the other, the analysis can be confounded because users may be biased, or have multiple accounts, or be using corporate accounts. 鈥淭here is an on-going debate about how to use sites like Twitter to measure certain trends,鈥� says Mislove.
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