ladyinhislife
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Michael Jackson's death: the saddest moment in the history of Internet
Wednesday, 29 July 2009 11:09
It might not come as such a surprise that average happiness peaks on Election Days and again on Christmas Days, at least by one reckoning. What’s new is that such a thing can be measured by analyzing vast amounts of daily, real-time verbiage.
That’s what two University of Vermont researchers have done for an article published recently in The Journal of Happiness Studies. The UVM researchers, computer scientist Chris Danforth and mathematician Peter Dodds, looked at 10 million blog sentences that began “I feel ... ” or “I am feeling ... .” They scored the words in the sentences, compiled averages, and looked for patterns, or mood swings — over the course of a year, or over the days of the week.
They found that the overall average score tended to be relatively high, for example, on Valentine’s Day and on weekends; low on Wednesdays, and on Sept. 11 anniversaries — and the day Michael Jackson died. The day of Michael Jackson's death is definitely the saddest moment of their research.
Besides blogs, Danforth and Dodds looked at pop song lyrics composed by Jackson and thousands of other artists between 1960 and 2007, highlighting Jackson’s “Billie Jean” to demonstrate their scoring method. That method uses 1,034 words assigned “valences” on a 1-9 scale in the Affective Norms for English Words system developed by psychologists. So, in the first line of “Billie Jean,” “She was more like a beauty queen from a movie scene,” the only three ANEW words are “beauty” (which has a score of 7.82), queen (6.44) and movie (6.86). The overall average valence (score) for “Billie Jean” is 7.1 — as compared to 6.3 for “Thriller,” and 6.4 for Jackson’s songs overall.
Beyond Jackson, Danforth and Dodds found that the average score for pop lyrics declined — that is, became less happy — over the decades. “We see that the decrease in average valence for lyrics after 1980 is due to a loss of positive words such as ‘love,’ baby,’ and ‘home,’ and a gain in negative words such as ‘hate,’ ‘pain,’ and ‘death,’” they write.
Source:
mjportal.com
Wednesday, 29 July 2009 11:09
It might not come as such a surprise that average happiness peaks on Election Days and again on Christmas Days, at least by one reckoning. What’s new is that such a thing can be measured by analyzing vast amounts of daily, real-time verbiage.
That’s what two University of Vermont researchers have done for an article published recently in The Journal of Happiness Studies. The UVM researchers, computer scientist Chris Danforth and mathematician Peter Dodds, looked at 10 million blog sentences that began “I feel ... ” or “I am feeling ... .” They scored the words in the sentences, compiled averages, and looked for patterns, or mood swings — over the course of a year, or over the days of the week.
They found that the overall average score tended to be relatively high, for example, on Valentine’s Day and on weekends; low on Wednesdays, and on Sept. 11 anniversaries — and the day Michael Jackson died. The day of Michael Jackson's death is definitely the saddest moment of their research.
Besides blogs, Danforth and Dodds looked at pop song lyrics composed by Jackson and thousands of other artists between 1960 and 2007, highlighting Jackson’s “Billie Jean” to demonstrate their scoring method. That method uses 1,034 words assigned “valences” on a 1-9 scale in the Affective Norms for English Words system developed by psychologists. So, in the first line of “Billie Jean,” “She was more like a beauty queen from a movie scene,” the only three ANEW words are “beauty” (which has a score of 7.82), queen (6.44) and movie (6.86). The overall average valence (score) for “Billie Jean” is 7.1 — as compared to 6.3 for “Thriller,” and 6.4 for Jackson’s songs overall.
Beyond Jackson, Danforth and Dodds found that the average score for pop lyrics declined — that is, became less happy — over the decades. “We see that the decrease in average valence for lyrics after 1980 is due to a loss of positive words such as ‘love,’ baby,’ and ‘home,’ and a gain in negative words such as ‘hate,’ ‘pain,’ and ‘death,’” they write.
Source:
mjportal.com
