Urban Life is #Tweetable

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Half of the people on the planet live in cities, so we decided to find out whether urban residents are happy and whether some cities are more desirable than others. We found some of the answers in an unconventional place—your Twitter feed.Every time somebody posted something about their life, their dreams or simply what they ate for dinner, we analyzed it for sentiment—how many positive or negative words tweeters used to describe their feelings. Over two years we looked at millions of social media posts in eight U.S. cities for our book Urban Social Listening: Potential and Pitfalls for Using Microblogging Data in Studying Cities.
Tweets are the digital versions of those fabled crumbs that Hansel and Gretel dropped in the forest. They are a rich source of new insights into a range of social phenomena. Big companies already have mined this new frontier of social listening to market their products and guide their decision-making and investments. Twitter and other microblog data have been used to aid rescue efforts after earthquakes, tweak public transit routes and monitor heart disease rates in rural areas.
For government agencies and other organizations looking to address the challenges facing urban America, this kind of digital eavesdropping can be transformative. Our own work seems to contradict conventional wisdom that residents in cities experiencing population decline must surely be unhappy.
For our research, we created rankings from a vocabulary-based analysis of all words in a tweet containing some kind of sentiment. For instance, the word “good” generated a positive score, while “terrible” led to a negative score. After totaling up the scores, we were able to rank the happiness quotient in the eight cities based on whether residents expressed positive or negative sentiments. We compared our happiness scores with data from the U.S. census, like income and educational attainment—the conventional ...

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