A city-wide examination of fine-grained human emotions through social media analysis

PLoS One. 2023 Feb 1;18(2):e0279749. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0279749. eCollection 2023.

Abstract

The proliferation of Social Media and Open Web data has provided researchers with a unique opportunity to better understand human behavior at different levels. In this paper, we show how data from Open Street Map and Twitter could be analyzed and used to portray detailed Human Emotions at a city wide level in two cities, San Francisco and London. Neural Network classifiers for fine-grained emotions were developed, tested and used to detect emotions from tweets in the two cites. The detected emotions were then matched to key locations extracted from Open Street Map. Through an analysis of the resulting data set, we highlight the effect different days, locations and POI neighborhoods have on the expression of human emotions in the cities.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Cities
  • Emotions
  • Humans
  • London
  • San Francisco
  • Social Media*

Associated data

  • figshare/10.6084/m9.figshare.21408204

Grants and funding

This work was partially supported by the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, Strategic Information and Communications R&D Promotion Program (MIC/SCOPE) #171507010 (https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_sosiki/joho_tsusin/scope/) and the Japan society for the promotion of science KAKENHI Grant Numbers 16H01722, 17H01822, 22K12274 and 22K19837 (https://www.jsps.go.jp/english/index.html). Apart from these, there was no additional external funding received for this study.