Peter Sheridan Dodds
London E1W 1YW, UK
Portland, ME 04101
2nd floor
11th floor
Boston, MA 02115
2nd floor
London E1W 1LP, UK
Talk recording
I will survey our efforts at the Computational Story Lab to quantify human stories of all kinds. I will present examples of our "lexical meters"---online, interactive instruments that use social media and other texts to quantify population rates of a wide array of human behavior such as wealth, exercise levels, obesity rates, and depression. I will cover a selection of a wide range of interrelated projects, including but not limited to: How 10 diverse natural languages entail a striking encoding of the Pollyanna Principle through a frequency-independent positivity bias; Our hedonometric analyses of works of literature and movies; the Lexicocalorimeter, a principled meter that turns phrases into calories; the stories of sports; the notions of lexical and story turbulence; time compression for news and stories; the basics of a POTUSometer; an understanding of the scaling break in Zipf's law; and the failures of large corpora such as Google Books. I will close with some thoughts on the nature of human stories and venture that a science of stories now has the potential to now be developed in full, and that its success will be crucial in understanding the evolution, stability, and fracturing of social systems.
Online:
http://vermontcomplexsystems.org
http://panometer.org/instruments/lexicocalorimeter/
Co-hosted by NU Lab