Hedonometer
A hedonometer or hedonimeter is a device used to gauge happiness or pleasure. Conceived of at least as early as 1880,[1] the term was used in 1881 by the economist Francis Ysidro Edgeworth to describe "an ideally perfect instrument, a psychophysical machine, continually registering the height of pleasure experienced by an individual."[2]
More recently, it has been used to refer to a tool developed by Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth to gauge the valence of various corpora, including historical State of the Union addresses, song lyrics, and online tweets and blogs.[3][4][5] A version of the tool is available at hedonometer.org, which they call a sort of "Dow Jones Index of Happiness",[6] and hope will be used by government officials in conjunction with other metrics as a gauge of the population's well-being.[7]
See also
External links
- Hedonometer.org
- If you're happy, then we know it: Scientists build 'hedonometer' (July 24, 2009)
- Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network: Hedonometrics and Twitter
References
- ↑ Oxford English Dictionary definition
- ↑ Edgeworth's Hedonimeter and the Quest to Measure Utility
- ↑ Reuters - "Jackson's death was blogosphere's saddest day: study"
- ↑ Measuring the Happiness of Large-Scale Written Expression: Songs, Blogs, and Presidents
- ↑ The Atlantic - "The Geography of Happiness According to 10 Million Tweets"
- ↑ Computational Story Lab - "Now online: the Dow Jones Index of Happiness"
- ↑ Bloomberg Businessweek - "Forget GDP. Data Crunchers Measure Happy Tweets for Key Economic Indicator"
