This collaborative research-project between Global Pulse (www.unglobalpulse.org) and SAS (www.sas.com) investigates how social media and online user-generated content can be used to enrich the understanding of the changing job conditions in the US and Ireland by analyzing the moods and topics present in unemployment-related conversations from the open social web and relating them to official unemployment statistics. For more information on this project or the other projects in this series, please visit: http://www.unglobalpulse.org/research.