title: The Lexicocalorimeter: Gauging public health through caloric input and output on social media.
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.|Vermont Center for Complex Systems, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.|Computational Story Lab, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.|Vermont Advanced Computing Core, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.
authors.forename: Sharon E
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Alajajian
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.|Vermont Center for Complex Systems, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.|Computational Story Lab, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.|Vermont Advanced Computing Core, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.|School of Information, University of California Berkeley, 102 South Hall #4600, Berkeley, CA 94720, United States of America.
authors.forename: Jake Ryland
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Williams
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.|Vermont Center for Complex Systems, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.|Computational Story Lab, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.|Vermont Advanced Computing Core, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.
authors.forename: Andrew J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Reagan
authors.affiliation: Women, Infants and Children, East Boston, Massachusetts 02128, United States of America.
authors.forename: Stephen C
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Alajajian
authors.affiliation: Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139, United States of America.
authors.forename: Morgan R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Frank
authors.affiliation: School of Mathematical Sciences, North Terrace Campus, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia 5005, Australia.
authors.forename: Lewis
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Mitchell
authors.affiliation: Culinary Arts and Food Science, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, United States of America.
authors.forename: Jacob
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lahne
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.|Vermont Center for Complex Systems, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.|Computational Story Lab, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.|Vermont Advanced Computing Core, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.
authors.forename: Christopher M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Danforth
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.|Vermont Center for Complex Systems, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.|Computational Story Lab, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.|Vermont Advanced Computing Core, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05401, United States of America.
authors.forename: Peter Sheridan
authors.initials: PS
authors.lastname: Dodds
mesh_terms: D002149:Energy Intake; D062665:Epidemiological Monitoring; D005502:Food / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D011634:Public Health / Q000379:methods* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D061108:Social Media / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D014481:United States