For my thesis I am investigating methods for finding the happiness on Twitter. I’ll release a lot more of the information and data after it is all completed. But for now here are some small and interesting finds.

Number of tweets separated by day of the week.

What the above image shows is my full data set of tweets (around 400,000) and on which day those tweets were sent. Interesting to note is that weekends have around half as many posts as the weekdays. I know I definitely use Twitter more when I’m procrastinating.

As well as having the least amount of traffic, the weekends also suffer from an increased number of negative tweets. The graph below shows my take on finding the happiest day of the week.

Happiness across days of the week ( repeated for ease of viewing)

There have been several studies aiming to find the happiest days of the week; from psychological studies into the idea that Monday is the unhappiest day of the week to studies also using Twitter as their statistical source.

What this appears to show is that the weekend suffers from a large scale drop in happiness from a week day high on Thursday. There does seem to be some correlation between the number of tweets sent on a day and the over all happiness of that day. Is it possible that when we are happy we want to share that with the world?

More information and graphs will follow as the study continues.