Can you glean the mood of the nation from looking at Tweets? Researchers at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science think it’s possible, and have recently released an interesting analysis that sheds light on the emerging science of using social media as an alternative to traditional telephone survey methods.

Researchers took a sample of over 300 million tweets originating in the United States between September 2006 and August 2009, and mapped them based on the “location” line in users’ Twitter profiles. They also analyzed each tweet for mood, based on a word list that values “affective norms in English words.”

The data is summarized in this video, which seems to suggest that people in California are are happier than New Yorkers. As a native Californian who spends a lot of time in New York, I think it's probably the weather.  But no matter, the results are interesting and the visual is pretty cool in-and-of-itself.

This data visualization is intended to be as much a proof-of-concept as it is meaningful insight into the overall mood of people on west coast vs. east coast. And as a proof the concept that Twitter data may someday be harnessed to track the mood of specific segments, it’s compelling to us. The study’s authors describe this video data-visualization as follows:

In the video, green corresponds to a happy mood and red corresponds to a grumpier state of mind. The area of each state is scaled according to the number of tweets originating in that state. Note how the East Coast is consistently 3 hours ahead of the West Coast, so when we're sleeping in Boston, the Californians are tweeting away. It's also interesting that better weather seems to make you happier (or rather, that better weather is correlated with happier tweets): Florida and California seems to be consistently in a better mood than the remaining US. Also note how New Mexico and Delaware behave very differently from their neighbors. Full results, individual maps, and a high-res poster can be found on the dedicated Twitter Mood website.

Read the full Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Program on Networked Governance Study here.