Hedonometer

A hedonometer or hedonimeter is a device used to gauge happiness or pleasure. Conceived of at least as early as 1880,[1] 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."[2]

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.[3][4][5] A version of the tool is available at hedonometer.org, which they call a sort of "Dow Jones Index of Happiness",[6] and hope will be used by government officials in conjunction with other metrics as a gauge of the population's well-being.[7]

See also

External links

References

  1. ↑ Oxford English Dictionary definition
  2. ↑ Edgeworth's Hedonimeter and the Quest to Measure Utility
  3. ↑ Reuters - "Jackson's death was blogosphere's saddest day: study"
  4. ↑ Measuring the Happiness of Large-Scale Written Expression: Songs, Blogs, and Presidents
  5. ↑ The Atlantic - "The Geography of Happiness According to 10 Million Tweets"
  6. ↑ Computational Story Lab - "Now online: the Dow Jones Index of Happiness"
  7. ↑ Bloomberg Businessweek - "Forget GDP. Data Crunchers Measure Happy Tweets for Key Economic Indicator"
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Sunday, May 18, 2014. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.