15-07-2010

Check out our U.S. Twitter Mood Throughout the Day. This is not a study per se but, rather, a visualization to demonstrate certain temporal trends in the average mood scores of tweets, state by state. We do this using an existing, published method, and we present the average mood score of tweets in each state using a color scheme. In addition, we use a cartogram, as opposed to a regular map, to show the values of another set of variables, the number of tweets in each state, which are represented by the sizes of the states. While a cartogram tries to preserve the shape of each state, there is inevitably some distortion. This is because it is not geometrically possible, without distorting the overall shape of the system, to scale the sizes of adjacent regions arbitrarily and yet keep the regions connected. Not in Euclidean geometry anyway :)