The Science of Stories: Measuring and Exploring the Ecology of Human Stories with Lexical Instruments

Explore the innovative research conducted by the Computational Story Lab in measuring and analyzing social and cultural phenomena through lexical instruments. Delve into the use of social media and textual data to quantify population dynamics of human behavior, including happiness, public health, obesity rates, and depression. Discover how lexical meters function and their applications in uncovering natural language encodings of positivity biases across cultures, universal emotional arcs of stories, connections between social media posts and health, measures of fame and ultra-fame, and time compression for news. Gain insights into the importance of developing a post-disciplinary, collaborative science of human stories for understanding the evolution, stability, and fracturing of social systems in this 47-minute seminar presented by Peter Sheridan Dodds, Professor and Director of the Computational Story Lab at the Vermont Complex Systems Center, UVM.