SOCKS will advance initiatives grounded in principled methods through the quantitative measurement of sentiment and stories across a diverse portfolio of corpora. It will also provide new insights into the power and use of stories and narratives across a broad array of social, economic and health domains through integrated data and teams.

In astronomy and biology, the telescope and the microscope helped us describe phenomena far beyond our limitations, opening up vast new scientific realms. With the SOCKS program, we’re working to do the same for stories by building and refining instruments that can ‘distantly read’ and make sense of enormous collections of texts, whether they be libraries of books, streaming social media, or Vermont folktales from the 1800s. We need to understand how stories evolve and spread, the effects stories have on populations, and with SOCKS, we will help grow a measurement-first science of stories.

SOCKS builds upon an existing set of instruments to develop a data-driven, computational science of stories. Storywrangler 2.0 for [Topic X] ‘Ousiometrics’ for measuring the overall essential meaning arcs of real and fictional stories Plot-plotter for measuring how real and fictional narratives unfold over time through temporal networks

A central goal of this project is to make the wealth of information contained in local archives, such as Vermont’s public, educational, and governmental (PEG) archives, accessible to researchers, particularly those employing high-performance computing environments and engaged in trans- and post-disciplinary research at the intersection of computer science, the social sciences, and the humanities. Transform and increase data-science computing capacity to boost the growth of a Vermont open science ecosystem SOCKS OSPO Vermont consortium of open science

Storytelling plays a pivotal role in social connections, education and workforce participation, and community engagement in healthcare settings. SOCKS tools will be used to engage community partners, healthcare leaders in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and government regulators. Conversational storytelling in serious illness Unraveling structure and disruptions in conversation associated with Cognitive-Communication Impairments (CCIs) Using narratives as a digital phenotype to forecast mental health recovery from trauma

We will explore the ways that stories are imagined, constructed, challenged, reformulated, and reified through various forms of media, affecting geopolitics, national conversations, and daily lives. Conspiracy theories and real-world harms Sonic experiences of place in Vermont: Narratives of changing land/soundscapes over time Measuring social capital through media: Restorative justice, and COVID-19 in Vermont Driving change with climate stories: Personal narratives and personal experience Social media sentiment and forced migration narratives Narrative explanation A culturally situated model for data sovereignty and distributed data ownership

We will implement communications and dissemination with professional training opportunities (Alda), coupled with broadening audiences across the region (CBS), for increased public scientific literacy. Anticipated accomplishments by the end of the project include far-reaching impacts in new areas of science and frontiers of knowledge; a new, highly trained workforce in technology-based areas; and a pipeline of educators and next generation scholars trained to continue with new extramural funding and new publications for peers to disseminate and expand this area of research. SOCKS teacher academy in computer science education Curricular modules on SOCKS research for K-12 schools SOCKS undergraduate internship program Mentoring plan for graduate students, postdocs, and junior faculty

Stories are an essential part of how people comprehend, explain, predict, and seek to navigate the world. What are the fundamental kinds of stories? How do stories told through social networks influence our behavior? A powerful approach to quantifying the components of stories centers on enumerating the base units of n-grams—contiguous sequences of n words, including punctuation and other text elements in a body of writing—and how usages of and interactions between n-grams unfold over time.

Language is humanity’s greatest social technology. While we’ve been communicating for thousands of years, it is only recently that we’ve begun sharing content online—posting selfies, searching for validation, and expressing our uninformed opinions in hot takes and quote tweets. Making sense of all that is being said is a tall order, best suited to a suite of algorithms. Computers can digest bits of language and help us describe, explain, and understand cultural phenomenon at the scale of human populations. The StoryWrangler instrument reflects our first step towards wrestling the day’s events into coherence. It is an approximate daily leaderboard for language popularity around the globe. More information is available at the Story Wrangler website.

It’s what most people say they want. So how do we know how happy people are? You can’t improve or understand what you can’t measure. In a blow to happiness, we’re very good at measuring economic indices and this means we tend to focus on them. With our flagship instrument at hedonometer.org we’ve created an instrument that measures the happiness of large populations in near real time. We also link to applications of the instrument to literature, movies, and news. More information is available at the Hedonometer website.

The University of Vermont is hiring two tenure-track academic positions with a focus on Computational Linguistics and Digital Anthropology for Fall 2025 that will work with the SOCKS project. Other job opportunities related to the SOCKS project that arise will also be posted here.