hedonometer

{{short description|Device used to gauge happiness or pleasure}}

A hedonometer or hedonimeter is a device used to gauge happiness or pleasure. Conceived of at least as early as 1880,[http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50104110?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=hedonometer&first=1&max_to_show=10 Oxford English Dictionary definition] 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."[http://ideas.repec.org/p/mdl/mdlpap/0723.html Edgeworth's Hedonimeter and the Quest to Measure Utility]

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.[https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSTRE56S0TQ20090729 Reuters - "Jackson's death was blogosphere's saddest day: study"]{{cite journal | doi=10.1007/s10902-009-9150-9 | title=Measuring the Happiness of Large-Scale Written Expression: Songs, Blogs, and Presidents | date=2010 | last1=Dodds | first1=Peter Sheridan | last2=Danforth | first2=Christopher M. | journal=Journal of Happiness Studies | volume=11 | issue=4 | pages=441–456 | doi-access=free | arxiv=1703.09774 }}[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/the-geography-of-happiness-according-to-10-million-tweets/273286/ The Atlantic - "The Geography of Happiness According to 10 Million Tweets"] It is operated out of the University of Vermont (UVM), and has been in use since 2008.{{Cite journal|last=Mackenzie|first=Dana|date=2020-09-14|title=How algorithms discern our mood from what we write online|url=https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/technology/2020/how-algorithms-discern-our-mood-what-we-write-online|journal=Knowable Magazine|doi=10.1146/knowable-091120-1|s2cid=242984992 |doi-access=free}} A version of the tool is available at hedonometer.org, which they call a sort of "Dow Jones Index of Happiness",[http://www.uvm.edu/storylab/2013/04/30/now-online-the-dow-jones-of-happiness/ Computational Story Lab - "Now online: the Dow Jones Index of Happiness"] and hope will be used by government officials in conjunction with other metrics as a gauge of the population's well-being.[https://archive.today/20130628203749/http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-01/forget-gdp-dot-data-crunchers-measure-happy-tweets-for-key-economic-indicator Bloomberg Businessweek - "Forget GDP. Data Crunchers Measure Happy Tweets for Key Economic Indicator"]

Computer scientists trained the hedonometer to recognize the emotion behind data as tweets with sentiment analysis techniques. Danforth preferred a lexicon approach, that measures the weight of a word, due to the energy required for neural nets.{{cite web |last1=Mackenzie |first1=Dana |last2=Magazine |first2=Knowable |title=How Algorithms Discern Our Mood From What We Write Online |url=https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/natural-language-processing-algorithms-mood-discern-hedonometer/ |website=The Wire Science |date=19 September 2020}}

As of 2020, the hedonometer at UVM scrapes about 50 million tweets each day. Using sentiment analysis, the hedonometer takes the emotional temperature of the words published by users of various platforms.