How you can use Twitter to map people’s emotions

There are all sorts of tools out there for measuring social media sentiment. They’re incredibly useful to brands and journalists alike. But what if you could use Twitter to map people’s emotions geographically? Surely that would be even more useful

A few weeks ago, I spoke at a federal agency conference in Arlington, Viriginia and one of the most interesting topics was the potential use of social media, by intelligence agencies, to map out and predict social unrest. So I decided to start experimenting with the concept on my own.

By combining the linguistic analysis systems of TweetPsych with Twitter’s geo tagging data (which isn’t great yet) and the Google Maps API, I was able to plot tweets on specific latitude and longitude codes based on their emotional content.

Below you’ll see 6 maps of various kinds of psychological traits and their occurrences around the city of Boston. This is just the beginning of my exploration into this kind of data, so keep an eye out for more.