The Google Books project is a wonderful, vital enterprise with the potential to open up new quantitative ways to deeply explore culture, history, and language. And so it was with much anticipatory rubbing of hands together that we dove into the data set to see what we could find about the evolution of language. And then, after some standard suffering, and with much … [Read more...]
Hedonometer 2.0: Measuring happiness and using word shifts
With our Hedonometer, we're measuring how a (very capable) individual might feel when reading a large text—a day's worth of tweets from New York City, the first chapter of Moby Dick, or the music lyrics from all UK pop songs released in 1983. We'll describe two fundamental pieces of the Hedonometer in this post: How our simple measure works; … [Read more...]
Does QWERTY Affect Happiness?
Last week, news broke of a paper published in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review by Kyle Jasmin and Daniel Casasanto claiming to observe a positive relationship between the "right-handedness" of a word and its emotional valence. This is being called the 'QWERTY effect'. (You may recall that 'valence' is psych-speak for 'happiness' associated with words. What I called … [Read more...]
Positivity of the English language
By analyzing a rather large collection of words (a good fraction of a trillion) we extracted from the New York Times, music lyrics, the Google Books project, and Twitter, we've found that English is inherently positive. The manuscript is here, and some early press from Wired is here. Abstract: Within the last million years, human language has emerged and evolved as a … [Read more...]