TheAtlantic: Louisiana is the saddest state, while Hawaii is the happiest.
TheAtlantic: Louisiana is the saddest state, while Hawaii is the happiest.
The researchers coded each tweet for its happiness content, based on the appearance and frequency of words determined by Mechanical Turk workers to be happy (rainbow, love, beauty, hope, wonderful, wine) or sad (damn, boo, ugly, smoke, hate, lied). While the researchers admit their technique ignores context, they say that for large datasets, simply counting the words and averaging their happiness content produces “reliable” results.
