Interesting Twitter Studies: Mapping Happiness & Language on Twitter

A Twitter study by applied mathematicians from the University of Vermont places Hawaii first for happiness (with caveats for tourism):

Choropleth showing average word happiness for geotagged tweets in all U.S. states collected during the calendar year 2011. Applied mathematicians from the University of Vermont charted our words on Twitter to find the happiest and saddest states in the United States. (Lewis Mitchell)

Hawaii tweets were rich in words such as "happy" and "thanks" as well as greetings. Tweets in last ranked Louisiana included "pressure", "gone" and a healthy amount of profanity. The lowest ranked states also produce the highest number of racist tweets. It appears that racists tend to be unhappy. Shocking.

In another study the languages of New York's tweeters are mapped. The top three after English: Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese. This is interesting because it doesn't map to the demographics (<1% of New Yorkers are Japanese), but given that the average Japanese person tweets more than the average American, and the fact that Japanese is the fourth most used language on the web, its not entirely surprising.

Thanks to Bill Wright and Ken Berkun for the links.