Twitter tool shows a real-time view of our emotions
FollowResearchers from CSIRO have unveiled a new online tool developed for the Black Dog Institute, in partnership with Amazon Web Services, called ‘We Feel’ which analyses the words from millions of tweets to display a real-time view of our emotions.
The tool will help researchers understand how our emotions fluctuate over time due to changes in social, economic and environmental factors such as weather, time of day, news of a natural disaster or announcements about the economy.
We Feel will help Black Dog Institute’s researchers who are world leaders in the diagnosis; treatment and prevention of mood disorders such as depression, verify whether the large and fast sample of information coming from Twitter can accurately map our emotions. It is hoped the tool could help to understand how our collective mood changes, help monitor community mental health and predict where services needed to be assigned.
“We Feel looks for up to 600 specific words in a stream of around 27 million tweets per day and maps them to a hierarchy of emotions which includes love, joy, surprise, anger, sadness and fear,