presents
The Data of Storytelling: The State of Computational Narrative Understanding
Andrew Piper, PhD
Friday, November 3rd, 12:00-1:00 PM
Williams Family Room, UVM Davis Center
For more information, email epscor@uvm.edu
Narratives play an essential role in shaping human beliefs, fostering social change, and providing a sense of personal meaning, purpose and joy. Humans are in many ways primed for narrative. In this talk, I will discuss the current state of computational narrative understanding including new work from my lab that aims to study human storytelling at large scale. What are the cues that signal to readers or listeners that narrative communication is happening? How do imaginary stories differ from true ones and what can this tell us about the value of fictional storytelling for everyday life? How might we imagine large-scale narrative observatories to measure public and political health and well-being reflected through communities' collective narratives? As we face growing political and cultural polarization, understanding the production of stories at large scale can help us better understand how to potentially ameliorate as well as understand these differences.
Andrew Piper is Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. He directs the Bachelor of Arts and Science program at McGill and is editor of the Journal of Cultural Analytics. His work focuses on using the tools of data science, machine learning, and natural language processing to study human storytelling. He is the director of .txtlab, a laboratory for cultural analytics, and author most recently of, Enumerations: Data and Literary Study (Chicago 2018) and Can We Be Wrong? The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data (Cambridge 2020).
