Is Birmingham happy?

By Jon Bounds on May 15, 08 03:24 PM in Culture

A cross-party group of Christian MPs released a report this week that suggested that people were going wrong in striving to be happy. While the non-believers may question their motives, and yes they did suggest that an "erosion of religious values" was a cause of unhappiness, are we as a society happy? How can we tell?

It seems that social scientists measure happiness by just asking people to rate their happiness on a scale of 1-10. Governmental scales take more variables into account, crime figures, health, and even economics. Clearly, while money doesn't make you happy you need enough for the grind of existence not to make you unhappy.

There's an almost standard move to blame "progress". Each new invention ties us more closely to our employers meaning we can't even hide. Each new labour-saving device ends up creating more work, as anyone who's attempted to clean a smoothie maker will testify. At the other end, there are claims (like here on the New Generation Arts blog) that technology will be what sets us free.

But what if technology could help, in the first instance at least let us work out just how happy we are. The measurements used now don't really get near enough for me, they're too general too subjective, and too slow to allow us to work out what effect events have.

These days there is much more information floating around that can be used to help measure happiness, we can look a news headlines, what people write on their blogs, even the "ambient information streams" that are tweets. So, is it possible to snatch a bunch of this as it passes, look at how people are feeling and work out if Birmingham is happy?

Being the sort of person I am, geeky and too impatient to wait for someone else, I knocked together a little web application that attempts to do just that. Every half an hour it looks for the latest blog posts about Birmingham, the latest local news headlines, and anything said on Twitter by people in and around the city. The text is then scanned for "emotion" and, here's where it gets a little subjective, I worked out a list of "emotion words" and weighted them on a scale from -10 being very unhappy to 10 being very happy. The totals are then added up to give a happiness rating for the city at that time.

There's nothing very exciting to look at (though you can at upyourend.co.uk/isbrumhappy), just a rating and an attempt to push that even more abstractly into colour, but on a superficial level at least it seems to work. Last Saturday, a weekend day of almost unremembered sunshine, the rating hit "superb" and by Sunday tea time (perhaps Villa not in Europe, Blues relegated, that dull ache of an impending Monday morning, Antiques Roadshow) it had dropped to an "average".

I'm not claiming anything scientific here, but a proper study could produce an accepted list of emotions and also factor in other measures. I've left the program recording the data, and at some point I'll get round to graphing it. Overlay temperature, sports results, news items, even the price of a lager in The Spotted Dog and we might have what we need to work out what makes our city chirpy.

Then it would be just up to us to make sure we fix the price of beer, the weather and get the rest of the Spice Girls to join Victoria in retirement. Oh, well, at least it would be a start.

You can get twice daily Brum Happiness updates via twitter - follow @birminghamuk.

Comments (6)

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6 Comments

Derek Belm said:

Bounds, Mr,

What an actually factually splendid idea.
Happiness makes the world go round - apart from gravity and stuff. I have little time for religiosity, so would be far happier (no pun intended) to make usage of your online contraption.

I myself am exceedingly pleased at the moment as everything in the world of Belm is going swimmingly.
The icing on the metaphysical cake was being served a rather splendid four-course meal by one of Birmingham's very own leading chefs this very week - a review of which I have posted upon my own blog and have submitted to our local newspaper (The Shouty Villager) for their consideration.

I am happy and I'm not afraid to admit it.

May 15, 2008 5:00 PM

Derek Belm said:

Bounds, Mr,

I am happy and I'm not afraid to admit it.

May 15, 2008 5:01 PM

sid langley said:

Mr B is obviously so happy he is saying everything twice.
Mr B is obviously so happy he is saying everything twice.

May 16, 2008 1:31 PM

Derek Belm said:

Sirs/Madams,

The second comment is clearly by an imposter.
I demand rectification.
(PS: I am actually factually Derek (Mr) Belm).

May 16, 2008 5:03 PM

Paul Thewlis said:

It would be interesting to see your list of 'emotion words'. Does it include emoticons? ;-)

May 17, 2008 12:16 AM

Jon Bounds said:

I'm not sure you see emoticons used much apart from the "el joko" ;) winking one we use when we're tying to cover our back after typing something we think might offend ;)

The 'tag' cloud on the site show all the words that have been found that time.

May 21, 2008 6:06 PM