New Hampshire Public Radio interviews Chris Danforth '01, co-creater of a way to measure worldwide happiness in real time

New Hampshire Public Radio interviews Chris Danforth ’01, an applied mathematician at the University of Vermont, and colleague Peter Dodds, who have created a way to measure worldwide happiness in real time, as expressed in blogs and Twitter. Mining the content of some 2.3 million blogs, they focused on words with known psychological valence; words like “triumphant” and “paradise” would score high while “hostage” and “suicide” would score low. Their method shows that Election Day 2008 was the happiest in four years, while the day of Michael Jackson’s death was among the unhappiest. They’ve also looked at popular songs (Luther Vandross scores happy). Read their study “Measuring the Happiness of Large-Scale Written Expression: Songs, Blogs, and Presidents.” (View Text)