What New Media can tell us about ourselves
In July, an interesting article made the news rounds. A team at Northeastern University analyzed three years' of public tweets, and categorized them as "positive" or "negative" by identifying indicative words. Then with this data, the team could measure the "mood" of the United States across different dimensions (e.g., typical mood curve throughout the day, East vs West Coast, etc.):
I admire people that take new sources of data and look at it in interesting ways like this. Nerd envy. So in a moment of boredom I tried something: comparing the count of results that Google fineds for specific words. Here's what we find:
Love: 1,080,000,000
Like: 1,480,000,000
Hate: 127,000,000
Ours: 29,000,000
Yours: 89,500,000
Mine: 184,000,000
Debt: 87,200,000
Profit: 130,000,000
Peace: 180,000,000
War: 478,000,000
Gun: 122,000,000
Kiss: 135,000,000
Fun: 443,000,000
Work: 1,180,000,000
Sour: 18,500,000
Bitter: 30,100,000
Sweet: 212,000,000
Candy: 77,600,000
Healthy: 131,000,000
Earth: 279,000,000
Water: 590,000,000
Air: 661,000,000
Fire: 2,290,000,000
Yes, I know that I'm not controlling for homonyms, but it was somewhat fun and interesting to do. I was surprised at so many results for "fire" -- I had thought that "earth" would have more results. readers: any thoughts from your perspective?
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