I wasn’t exactly methodical about when I made the pulls because I was too busy enjoying saying goodbye to 2018. This process yielded 41,502 unique tweets. The earliest tweets dated as far back to December 22nd and, thanks to the magic of time-zones, extended into 5:17 AM January 1st. I started collecting data around 12:00 PM December 31st and did the last pull just after 12:00 AM January 1st. Using Twitter’s API, I searched for tweets containing #newyearsresolutions2019, #resolutions, #newyearsresolution, #newyearsresolutions (yes, there was a difference) and any tweet that contained the words “new years resolutions” without awkwardly cramming them into a hashtag. Here’s what they are thanks to Big Data™.” Instead, it’s just a fun way to get a sense of some broader patterns that existed out in the Twitterverse encircling new years resolutions. This is what I’m emphatically NOT saying: “Computer algorithms show that there are only 7 types of New Years resolution tweets. Although this project uses techniques from computational social science, I’m not racing to stamp the label of “science” on it. What are the topics to twitterers tweet about in relation to resolutions? What are the most common words in those topics? Does it say anything about how we approach the idea of resolutions? Those are the questions we’re going to answer today. So for that, I took to Twitter and using some good ol’ computational social science decided to look at how people were approaching the idea of resolutions. I decided that nothing really looks at how people approach the whole resolution enterprise. There are articles out there about what the most popular resolutions are, how achieving them won’t make us happy, and how we’re probably not going to achieve them anyways. And if people are doing something ( anything really), you can bet that a decent number of them are tweeting about it.
It’s the start of a new year! People are changing out calendars, reaching out to loved ones, and deciding on what resolutions they want to try and hold themselves to this year.