Applications

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.