A new study that analyzed more than 10,000 words used in Twitter tweets to determine the country’s “happiest” and “saddest” cities and states, finds that Albany ranks as the #2 saddest city, and that Georgia is only the 47th happiest state, reports The Albany Herald.
The “saddest” city, according to the study, is Beaumont, Texas. The “happiest” is Napa, Calif.
The “happiest” state is Hawaii. Louisiana was found to be the “saddest.”
Albany residents have informally launched a positivity campaign, with the Albany Downtown Manager’s Office posting a smiley face graphic on Facebook Thursday with the hashtags #albanyGA, #dtownAlbanyGA, #happy and #smile.
But some who posted comments to the Albany Herald’s website and Facebook page weren’t so optimistic, the paper said. Most of the comments focused on crime issues, and what some say is a lack of leadership in government and education, the Albany paper reported.
“I can believe it. It’s depressing here,” one poster said.
According to a CNN story about the study, researchers at the University of Vermont sifted through more than 10 million geotagged tweets from 2011 to map out the moods of Americans in urban areas. Researchers ranked locations based on the frequency of positive and negative words using the Mechanical Turk Language Assessment word list.
The list includes 10,000 words rated on a scale of 1 to 10 according to how “happy” they are.
Negative words include mad, hate, no, boo, smoke and jail, “as well as a colorful and thorough assortment of expletives,” CNN said.
Happy words include LOL, haha, good, nice, sleep, wine, and words related to food and the beach, said CNN.
Rainbow is one of the happiest words, while earthquake is one of the saddest, the news network said.
Read more here: http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/19/tech/social-media/twitter-happiness/index.html
