This is ace work from Facebook (I know I’m a little late here). ‘Gross National Happiness Index’ is similar to Facebook’s trend-tracking tool, Lexicon. Data is collected from “public and semi-public forums” on Facebook. To determine if a particular status update is happy or sad (basically sentiment analysis similar to Nielsen and Radian6), the app searches for popular phrases and words that the engineers have associated with each sentiment.
The graph contains several metrics. GNH represents Gross National Happiness. The other two, Positivity and Negativity, represent the two components of GNH: The extent to which words used on that day were positive and negative. Gross National Happiness is the difference between the positivity and negativity scores.
On holidays like Christmas and Obama’s inauguration, we were pretty happy. Conversely, we were sad when Asian stock market crashed and when Michael Jackson died.
It’s amazing what we can do with data these days.
