The Lexicocalorimeter: Gauging public health through caloric input and output on social media
Name
Alajajian-2017-The Lexicocalorimeter_ Gauging.pdf
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4.41 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Alajajian, Sharon E.
Williams, Jake Ryland
Reagan, Andrew J.
Alajajian, Stephen C.
Mitchell, Lewis
Lahne, Jacob
Danforth, Christopher M.
Dodds, Peter Sheridan
Frank, Morgan Ryan
Date Issued
February 2017
Journal
PLOS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Citation
Alajajian, Sharon E. et al. “The Lexicocalorimeter: Gauging Public Health through Caloric Input and Output on Social Media.” Ed. Cheng-Yi Xia. PLOS ONE 12.2 (2017): e0168893.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We propose and develop a Lexicocalorimeter: an online, interactive instrument for measuring the “caloric content” of social media and other large-scale texts. We do so by constructing extensive yet improvable tables of food and activity related phrases, and respectively assigning them with sourced estimates of caloric intake and expenditure. We show that for Twitter, our naive measures of “caloric input”, “caloric output”, and the ratio of these measures are all strong correlates with health and well-being measures for the contiguous United States. Our caloric balance measure in many cases outperforms both its constituent quantities; is tunable to specific health and well-being measures such as diabetes rates; has the capability of providing a real-time signal reflecting a population’s health; and has the potential to be used alongside traditional survey data in the development of public policy and collective self-awareness. Because our Lexicocalorimeter is a linear superposition of principled phrase scores, we also show we can move beyond correlations to explore what people talk about in collective detail, and assist in the understanding and explanation of how population-scale conditions vary, a capacity unavailable to black-box type methods.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0168893
