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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Josie Giles
IDEaS Marketing Communications Manager
josie@gatech.edu
Summary Sentence: Peter S. Dodds presents “The Science of Stories: Measuring and Exploring the Ecology of Human Stories with Lexical Instruments” on November 6.
Full Summary: The Institute for Data Engineering and Science presents the 2019 IDEaS Distinguished Lecture on Wednesday, November 6. Peter S. Dodds, the Flint Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Vermont, will deliver “The Science of Stories: Measuring and Exploring the Ecology of Human Stories with Lexical Instruments.” The event will be held in the Klaus Advanced Computing Building, Rooms 1116 E & W, from 3:00-4:00 p.m.
Peter S. DoddsThe Institute for Data Engineering and Science presents the 2019 IDEaS Distinguished Lecture on Wednesday, November 6. Peter S. Dodds, the Flint Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Vermont, will deliver “The Science of Stories: Measuring and Exploring the Ecology of Human Stories with Lexical Instruments.” The event will be held in the Klaus Advanced Computing Building, Rooms 1116 E & W, from 3:00-4:00 p.m.
Abstract
I will survey our efforts at the Computational Story Lab to measure and study a wide array of social and cultural phenomena using “lexical meters” — online, interactive instruments that use social media and other texts to quantify population dynamics of human behavior. These include happiness, public health, obesity rates, and depression. I will explain how lexical meters work and how we have used them to uncover natural language encodings of positivity biases across cultures, universal emotional arcs of stories, links between social media posts and health, measures of fame and ultra-fame, and time compression for news. I will offer some thoughts on how fully developing a post-disciplinary, collaborative science of human stories is vital in our efforts to understand the evolution, stability, and fracturing of social systems.
Bio
Peter S. Dodds is the Flint Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Vermont. His research focuses on system-level big data problems in many areas, including language and stories, sociotechnical systems, contagion, and ecology. He is the director of UVM’s Complex Systems Center, co-director of UVM’s Computational Story Lab, and a visiting faculty fellow at the Vermont Advanced Computing Core. Dodds is the recipient of an NSF Career Award and has received funding from NSF, NASA, ONR, and the MITRE Corporation, among others.
