Symposium on the Science of Stories

James Bagrow

Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Vermont

Information flow on networks
James Bagrow is an Associate Professor of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of Vermont and a member of the Vermont Complex Systems Center. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Complex Networks Research at Northeastern University and a research assistant professor at Northwestern University. Professor Bagrow received his Ph.D. in Physics from Clarkson University in 2008. His research interests include network science, complex systems, computational social science, and statistics and machine learning.

Abstract: Modern society depends on the flow of information over online social networks, and popular social platforms now generate significant volumes of behavioral and communication data. However, it remains unclear what fundamental limits may exist when using these data to predict the activities and interests of individuals. In this talk, I will review the research on this problem, from observational studies to experiments and big data analyses. In my research group, we are developing mathematical models and applying tools from information theory to study the flow of information on networks. In recent work, we used these tools to estimate the predictive information content of the writings of Twitter users and to what extent that information flows between users. Distinct temporal and social effects are visible in this information flow, and these estimates provide a fundamental bound on the predictive accuracy achievable with these data. Due to the social flow of information, we estimate that approximately 95% of the potential predictive accuracy attainable for an individual is available within the social ties of that individual only, without requiring the individual's data. This work has implications for online privacy: individuals outside an online social platform may still be predictable with the data possessed by the platform's owner, due to the flow of information from social ties on that platform.

Andrew Barnaby

University of Vermont, Professor of English

Small Data: A Cautionary Tale
Andrew Barnaby has taught at the University of Vermont since 1993; his primary area of teaching and research is early-modern English literature and culture with special emphasis on Shakespeare (including performance-based courses) and Milton. He also regularly teaches courses on the Bible and on literary adaptation. His recent scholarly efforts include published essays on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, Hamlet, and Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. His book, Coming Too Late: Reflections on Freud and Belatedness, has just been published by SUNY Press. Among his creative efforts are a musical adaptation of A Comedy of Errors for young actors (performed in Burlington by Very Merry Theatre), the one-act play, Hamlét Mignon, and the playlet “A Man Had Three Daughters.” He is currently at work on a full-length play (Shakescenes: A Work of Revisionist Theater), a novella (Good News, Bad News, According to Mark), and a study of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (Moses Among the Israelites).

Jenny Bower

Keyboardist + Data Scientist; PhD candidate, Gund graduate fellow, University of Vermont

Data visualizations using sound
Jenny's enthusiasm for diverse repertoire is imbued in her work as a soloist as well as in collaborations with various orchestras, chamber ensembles, and soloists across the US, Canada, and China. She has premiered a number of pieces for organ and harpsichord, including the first public U.S. performance of Laudes, Jean-Louis Florentz’s majestic seven-movement opus for organ. Her musicianship is rooted in the symbiotic, physical relationship between historical instrument and player, a relationship informed by experience with period instruments and concepts of embodiment drawn from gynocentric performance practices. During her time at Oberlin, Jenny studied harpsichord with Webb Wiggins, and organ with James David Christie, Olivier Latry, and Mme. Marie-Louise Langlais, ultimately completing a master's degree through which she explored the performance practice of rhythmic inequality within early baroque Spanish keyboard sources. After completing dual degrees in geology and historical keyboard performance, Jenny has enjoyed keeping a foot in two worlds, allowing her to thrive as an accomplished scientist and musician. Within this duality, she has competed as a semifinalist in the 2016 Jurow International Harpsichord Competition, studied lead speciation within urban soils at the Advanced Photon Source, and performed regularly as a member of the Shanghai Camerata. As a scientist, her research interests include the study of urban contaminant geochemistry, place-based investigative community science, and predictive geospatial modeling. Since completing a master’s degree in Geology at the University of Vermont in May of 2017, she has enjoyed working as a data tinkerer and GIS wizard for the State of Vermont, while performing weekly on an 1879 Hook and Hastings organ in a vibrant church community near the Green Mountains.

Fritz Breithaupt

Provost Professor, Germanic Studies & Cognitive Science, Indiana University, Bloomington

Narrative and Emotion: Insights from the Telephone Game
Fritz Breithaupt is professor of Germanic Studies, adjunct professor in Comparative Literature, and affiliated professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University. He has published six books, co-edited four volumes, and has published about 50 full-length articles. His latest books provide humanities responses to work in cognitive science, addressing issues of empathy, narrative thinking, and moral reasoning. For example, he suggests that human empathy typically involves three (and not two) people. By training, he is a comparatist. His work on Goethe and the romantics, as well as on European literature and philosophy since 1740 is ongoing. He also runs a lab, the Experimental Humanities Lab, in which he uses methods of story retelling to develop a corpus of basic narratives. At Indiana University, he has served as chair of the department, was the director of the West European Studies Institute, was a co-founder of an official EU-Center of Excellence, interim dean of the Hutton Honors College, and served as acting director of several other institutes, such as the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He has received many honors and distinctions for his work, including an Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellowship and was the first Distinguished Remak Scholar at Indiana University. He writes frequently for the German press, especially Die Zeit and Zeit Campus. When he is not writing or teaching, he spends time with his family or catches up to his fellow cyclists.

Chris Danforth

Director, Vermont Advanced Computing Center and Professor, Department of Mathematics & Statistics

The science of stories and sentiment analysis
Danforth is an applied mathematician interested in modeling a variety of physical, biological, and social phenomenon. He has applied principles of chaos theory to improve weather forecasts as a member of the Mathematics and Climate Research Network, and developed a real-time remote sensor of global happiness using messages from Twitter: the Hedonometer. Danforth co-runs the Computational Story Lab with Peter Dodds, and helps run UVM's reading group on complexity.

Peter Sheridan Dodds

Director, Vermont Complex Systems Institute and Professor, Department of Computer Science

Introduction to the Science of Stories
Dodds's research focuses on system-level, big data problems in many areas including language and stories, sociotechnical systems, Earth sciences, biology, and ecology. His foundational funding was an NSF CAREER award granted to study sociotechnical phenomena (2009-2015). Together with Chris Danforth, he co-runs the Computational Story Lab.

Tina Escaja

Professor of Spanish, Department of Romance languages and Linguistics, UVM

RoboPoems: Poetry-inflected robots
Tina Escaja is Professor of Spanish and the Director of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at UVM. She joined the Spanish department in 1993 after earning her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published extensively on gender, technology and representation at the turn-of-the-twentieth-century and their connections with the current turn-of-the-millennium in Latin America and Spain. Her scholarly books include the monograph Salomé decapitada: Delmira Agustini y la estética finisecular de la fragmentación (2000) and the edition of essays Compromiso e hibridez: Aproximaciones a la poesía hispánica contemporánea escrita por mujeres. (2007). As a teacher and scholar, she has won the coveted Kroepsch-Maurice Excellence in Teaching Award (2013) and the Dean’s Lecture Award for excellence in teaching and research (2010) as well as UVM’s University Scholar Award (2015-16).

Escaja is also an accomplished poet, writer and digital artist. Her creative work transcends the traditional book form, leaping into digital art, robotics, augmented reality and multimedia projects exhibited in museums and galleries in Spain, Mexico and the United States. In 2003 she won the International Poetry Prize "Dulce María Loynaz" for her manuscript Caída Libre, published in 2004. Other poetry titles include 13 lunas 13 (2011), Código de barras (2007), and Respiración mecánica (2001/2014). Her collection Manual destructivista/Destructivist Manual (2016), with English translations by Kristin Dykstra, was selected among top ten bilingual readings by Latino Poetry Review in 2017. Escaja has also written award-winning fiction and plays, and is the author of experimental and hypertextual works, including Negro en Ovejas (2011), VeloCity (2000-2002), Código de barras (2006), the interactive novel Pinzas de metal (2003), Mora amor (2017), and Robopoem@s (2016). Her work has been translated into six languages and has appeared in literary collections around the world. Some of her digital and literary works can be experienced at http://www.uvm.edu/~tescaja/

Professor Escaja has served as Vice-President and President of the Asociación de Estudios de Género y Sexualidad (Hispanic Association of Gender and Sexuality Studies, formerly AILCFH), Vice-President and President of ALDEEU (Spanish Professionals in America) and is currently President of Feministas Unidas, Inc., Corresponding member for ANLE (Spanish Language Academy in the USA), and Vice-President of Red Poppy, a non-profit dedicated to promoting Latin American poetry in the United States.  

Talk Description: Robopoem@s, in its Quadrupeds version, are based on five insect-like robots whose legs and bodies are engraved with the seven parts of a poem written from the point of view of the robot. Their interaction with sensors and voice activation allows for an exchange with humans and with each other, emphasizing the existential issues addressed in the poem. Binary constructs such as creator/creature are questioned by these creatures purposely chosen from open-source models resembling insects and spiders, thus emphasizing anxiety and removal from humans while underlying the already problematic relation between humans and technology. Technology and humanity are reframed by these wandering robopoem@s, which ultimately recounts existential assumptions through poetry and robotics.

Vanessa Ferdinand

Research Fellow in Computational Cognitive Science, University of Melbourne

How cognition drives cultural evolution
An early interest in human genetic evolution led Vanessa to study anthropology, where she came to appreciate that culture itself evolves, and it may do so outside of direct genetic control. Cultural artifacts, such as language, music, and technology, survive and replicate by passing from mind to mind, and this males cognition the locus of cultural change. Further study of cognitive science gave her the computational and experimental tools to study cognitive biases as the driving forces behind cultural evolutionary change. Currently, she is working to advance cultural evolution theory by grounding it in cognitive mechanisms of cultural inheritance.

She holds a PhD in Language Evolution from the University of Edinburgh and an MSc in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Amsterdam. She just completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute in Cultural Evolutionary Theory and is moving on to a position in Computational Cognitive Science at the University of Melbourne.

Talk Description: In this talk I will give you a cognitive scientist's tour of cultural evolution. Stories, songs, arts, and technologies all survive by passing from person to person - and without a cognitive system to perceive, process, and produce these artifacts, culture would cease to be. One of the most intriguing aspects of culture is how it toggles between two distinct forms as it evolves: a private form in individuals' minds, and a public form that is out there for everyone to see. The interplay between these two forms of culture gives rise to complex dynamics over time, which I will illustrate with two neat examples: a mathematical model of idea-artifact coevolution, and some real-world cultural evolution data from a large-scale art project called Picbreeder."

John C. Franklin

Program Director and Professor Of Classics, University of Vermont

Hunting for Helen: A Lost Storytelling Engine in Greek Epic Poetry
I teach Greek and Latin language and literature, especially epic, lyric, and comedy, with occasional escapades into the Ancient Near East and music archaeology.

Much of my research has dealt with early Greek cultural history at the Near Eastern interface(s), focusing especially on the interaction of poetic/musical traditions, always in hopes of elucidating broader issues. My undergraduate background, in music composition and electronic music (B.M. New England Conservatory, 1988), remains an influence: the history of ancient music technology, both physical and conceptual, is crucial to my research.

Talk Description: This paper will present and analyze a collection of storytelling motifs and variants drawn from ancient Greek epic poetry. Sources include key passages of Homer’s Odyssey, and various later authors who preserve plot summaries and story fragments that derive from several lost epic poems. The material derives from, I argue, an early narrative subsystem of the genre that has survived in various vestigial forms. I shall attempt to reduce the variants to a single narrative ‘engine’ that allowed oral formulaic singers to generative wandering adventures, akin to those of Odysseus, but set in the Eastern Mediterranean; it centered especially on the possession of Helen of Sparta/Troy, either an effort by her husband Menelaos to recapture her immediately after her abduction by the Trojan prince Paris; or wandering travels in the same area with Menelaos after being recaptured from Troy.

Mirta Galesic

Cowan Chair in Human Social Dynamics at the Santa Fe Institute and Associate Researcher at the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany

Communicating Complex Data to the Public
Cowan Chair in Human Social Dynamics at the Santa Fe Institute and Associate Researcher at the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany

Galesic studies how simple cognitive mechanisms interact with social and physical environments to produce seemingly complex social phenomena.

Her projects include modeling and collecting data on social judgments and social learning, agent-based models of evolution of cooperation, developing theoretical sampling framework for understanding environmental uncertainty, finding simple rules for navigating complex financial environments, and communicating medical risks to the general public using different information formats.

Mohit Iyyer

Associate Professor in Computer Science at University of Maryland, College Park and a member of CLIP

Towards Understanding Narratives with Artificial Intelligence
Abstract: 
One of the fundamental goals of artificial intelligence is to build computers that understand language at a human level. Recent progress towards this goal has been fueled by deep learning, which represents words, sentences, and even documents with learned vectors of real-valued numbers. However, creative language—the sort found in novels, film, and comics—poses an immense challenge for such models because it contains a wide range of linguistic phenomena, from phrasal and sentential syntactic complexity to high-level discourse structures such as narrative and character arcs. In this talk, I discuss our recent work on applying deep learning to creative language understanding, as well as exploring the challenges that must be solved before further progress can be made. I begin with an general overview of deep learning before presenting model architectures for two tasks involving creative language understanding: 1) modeling dynamic relationships between fictional characters in novels, and 2) predicting dialogue and artwork from comic book panels. For both tasks, our models only achieve a surface-level understanding, limited by a lack of world knowledge, an inability to perform commonsense reasoning, and a reliance on huge amounts of data. I conclude by proposing ideas on how to push these models to produce deeper insights from creative language that might be of use to humanities researchers. 

Bio: 
Mohit Iyyer is an assistant professor in computer science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research focuses on designing deep neural networks for both traditional natural language processing tasks (e.g., question answering, sentiment analysis) and new problems that involve understanding creative language (e.g., modeling fictional narratives and characters). He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2017 and spent the past year as a researcher at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. 

Mary Louise Kete

Professor and Chair of the English Department, University of Vermont

The Twin Sciences of Story: What does the study of literature tell us about the affordances of story?

Eric Lindstrom

University of Vermont, Professor of English

Mr. Knightley, Other Minds, and the Science of Silent Reading
Informed at once by theological, philosophical, and poetic traditions, the argument of my book, Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry (2011), turns on a distinction between the authoritarian language of “let there be” and the quietism of “let be.” Romantic Fiat thus recasts a standard account we thought we knew from the history of ideas, about the language of imaginative creation in romantic poetry. The book also tries to model a kind of difficult critical movement between forms of literary analysis that stage conceptual interventions using literary texts (interpretation), and those that describe artworks (poetics).

My current scholarship focuses mainly on topics of philosophical aesthetics that bear on poets from William Wordsworth (d. 1850) to James Schuyler (d. 1991), and on the theory of poetry. I also write on Jane Austen, especially in relation to the practice of “ordinary language” philosophy in the work of J.L. Austin and Stanley Cavell. An ongoing book project is entitled “Jane Austen and Other Minds.”

Sylvia Morelli

Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Director of the Empathy and Social Connection Lab

Empathy and Social Connection in Story
Dr. Sylvia Morelli is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Director of the Empathy and Social Connection Lab. She received her BA in Psychology from Princeton University and PhD from UCLA. Prior to joining UIC, Dr. Morelli worked in the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab and explored whether positive empathy (i.e., our ability to share and understand others’ positive emotions) promotes prosocial behavior, social connection, and well-being. She uses a combination of behavioral and neuroimaging techniques, including functional magnetic resonance imaging, laboratory experiments, daily experience sampling, and social network analyses. Overall, her research aims to broaden our understanding of empathy and demonstrate its critical role in promoting well-being and positive social relationships.

Lisa Soros

Roman Family Teaching and Research Fellow, Barnard College

Inferring evolutionary narratives

Timothy Tangherlini

Professor, Dept of Scandinavian, School of Information, UC Berkeley

Folklore, Cultural Analytics, and the Science of Storytelling
Timothy R. Tangherlini is a Professor in the Dept. of Asian Languages and Cultures, and in the Scandinavian Section. His research and teaching focus on folklore. He is the co-editor of Nationalism and the Construction of Korean Identity (1999 with Hyung-il Pai) and Sitings: Critical Approaches to Korean Geography (2008 with Sallie Yea). He is also the co-producer of Our Nation: A Korean Punk Rock Community (2002 with Stephen Epstein). He is the English language editor of the Encyclopedia of Korean Seasonal Customs (2010 with Ria Chae).

His current work focuses on computation and the humanities.

Talk Description: Since the inception of the field, folkloristics--or the study of folklore--has been concerned with the study of stories. In this context, folklore can be understood as cultural expressive forms that circulate on and across social networks. In this short presentation, we explore two interrelated problems: the classification of stories and the analysis of story structure. In regard to the first problem, we explore how stories can be classified to align with a research problem, rather than the age-old problem of aligning research problems with existing classifiers. Based on work on flexible classifiers, we show how new questions emerge when a collection of stories is classified in this manner. In regard to the second problem, we show how a simple actant-relationship model can help us discover the generative narrative framework for stories within a tradition group. Such an approach allows us to develop a multi-scale understanding of the interactions between an underlying tradition, the domains of knowledge for that group, and the stories that people tell within and across those domains. Focusing primarily on legends--believable stories told as true--we consider the classification of stories of witches, ghosts and house elves in nineteenth century rural Denmark before moving on to discussions of rumors, the rise of the anti-vaccination movement in the United States, and the challenge of "fake news", Pizzagate, and the totalizing conspiracy theory of Q-Anon.