Symposium on the Science of Stories

Register Now

Contact Organizers

Agenda
- Day 1
- Day 2
- Day 3
Monday 15 October
10:00-11:00AM:
Peter Dodds - The Science of Stories
11:00AM-12:00PM:
Participant Introductions
12:00-1:30PM:
Lunch
1:30-2:30PM:
Chris Danforth - The science of stories and sentiment analysis
2:30-2:45PM:
Break
2:45-3:45PM:
Mohit Iyyer - Applications of deep learning to narrative understanding
3:45-4:00PM:
Break
4:00-5:00PM:
Mirta Galesic - Communicating Complex Data to the Public
6:30-8:30PM:
Welcome Reception upstairs balcony - Echo Center Aquarium

Tuesday 16 October
10:00-11:00AM:
Vanessa Ferdinand - forces that change culturally-transmitted data sets over time how culture emerges from interacting individuals and is continually reshaped by them.

11:00-12:00pm:
Fritz Breithaupt - Narrative and Emotion: Insights from the Telephone Game
Talk Description

11:00-12:00pm:

Fritz Breithaupt - Provost Professor, Germanic Studies & Cognitive Science, Indiana University, Bloomington

Narrative and Emotion: Insights from the Telephone Game

When people retell stories, what guides their retelling? Most previous research on story retelling and story comprehension has focused on information accuracy as the key measure of stability in transmission. This paper suggests that there is a second, affective, dimension that provides stability for retellings, namely affects, emotions, and moral intuition. In a series of large-sample studies with multiple iterations of retellings, i.e. the telephone game, we found evidence that people are quite accurate in preserving all degrees of emotions and affects – even when the event that produced the emotion in the original story is dropped or changed. Thus, we propose that the preservation of emotion, affect, and intuition is an implicit goal of retelling. The work is based on studies by the Experimental Humanities Lab (www.experimentalhumanities.com).
×

12:00-1:30PM:
Lunch
1:30-2:30PM:
Jim Bagrow - Information flow on networks
2:30-2:45PM:
Break
2:45-3:45PM:
Sylvia Morelli - Empathy and Social Connection in Story
3:45-4:00PM:
Break
4:00-5:00PM:
Working Groups
Download Agenda PDF
Logistics
Symposium Location:
ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center
1 College St
Burlington
Vermont 05401

Symposium Organizer
Juniper Lovato
Director of Outreach for Complex Systems
UVM Complex Systems Center
juniper.lovato@uvm.edu

About Burlington:

Burlington Vermont is a world-renowned tourist destination, the symposium is located in the state’s largest city on beautiful Lake Champlain.

With views across the lake to the Adirondacks in the west and the Green Mountains in the east, Burlington is a locus of year-round outdoor activities, and a vibrant local food and small farm movement.

Activities such as hiking, biking (the Colchester Causeway,
stretching nearly four miles out into Lake Champlain toward the
islands north of Burlington is very rewarding), kayaking, and tour-
ing the countryside and the many nearby mountains (Stowe and
the Von Trapp Family Lodge are just 45 minutes away, the magi-
cal Northeast Kingdom just a little further) are all great local activities. The magnificent Shelburne Farms estate and the remarkable Shelburne Museum would make for wonderful excursions in days adjacent to the symposium.

Burlington and the surrounding area are also home to many craft beer and hard cider breweries including Magic Hat, Switchback Brewery, and Citizen Cider, just to name a few.

Burlington also oddly enough has a really wonderful and pleasant airport, here is a nice article from the Atlantic entitled, If You Thought a Profitable Newspaper Was Surprising, How About This: A Pleasant Airport.

Slack Channel:

We have created a Slack Channel for this program so that you can communicate productively before and during the program. Upon registration, Juniper Lovato will send you an invitation.

How to pack:

The course will be business casual, leaning more towards casual. Wear clothing that will be comfortable for you in a classroom style setting. The classroom will be air-conditioned. Wearing layers is always encouraged. The temperature should be fairly warm in Burlington this time of year but bring a light coat for evenings. It is always a good idea to bring good walking shoes.

Very Nearby Hotels:

Official Symposium Roomblock:
*Hotel Vermont (downtown - 5 min walk to symposium) -
To make a reservation using our discounted rate please use the following link. Reservations must be made before September 14th, 2018.

Other Hotels:
Courtyard by Marriott Burlington Harbor (downtown - 5 min walk to symposium)
Hilton Burlington (downtown - 3 min walk to symposium)

Transportation in Burlington:

- Uber or Lyft are great options in Burlington and are quite reliable for trips around town or to and from the airport.

- Taxis:
Dubwright Taxi: 802-557-2461
Green Cab VT: 802-864-2424
Atlas Cab: 802-829-7721
Alpine Transportation: 802-923-6323
Future Taxi: 802-999-0002
Route 2 Cab: 802-363-7721
89 Taxi: 802-999-6724

- Bus: Green Mountain Transit is Burlington's local bus system. From the airport: The Chittenden County Transportation Authority’s South Burlington Circulator route # 12 connects BTV with Burlington, South Burlington, and the University of Vermont.

- Parking App: ParkMobile is a nice little mobile app that allows you to pay for parking meters using your phone.
PARTICIPATION FEES
- General: Early Bird $2,403 (After Early Bird: $2,603)
- Academic, Non-profit, Government: Early Bird $1,363 (After Early Bird: $1,563)
- Student/Educator/UVM Affiliates: Early Bird $843 (After Early Bird: $1,043)
- A limited number of free slots will be given to UVM students and faculty on a first-come-first-served basis, please contact juniper.lovato@uvm.edu for more details
Early Bird pricing ends July 20, 2018

We aim for this course to be an intimate experience, space is very limited and is available first-come-first-served.

A limited number of partial waivers will be given on the basis of merit and need (please contact juniper.lovato@uvm.edu)
Faculty Bios
- Information flow on networks
  
  Jim Bagrow - University of Vermont Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Assistant Professor
  
  Jim Bagrow
  Information flow on networks
  
  University of Vermont
  Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Assistant Professor
  
  Bagrow's interests include: Complex Networks (community detection, social modeling and human dynamics, statistical phenomena, graph similarity and isomorphism), Statistical Physics (non-equilibrium methods, phase transitions, percolation, interacting particle systems, spin glasses), and Optimization(glassy techniques such as simulated/quantum annealing, (non-gradient) minimization of noisy objective functions).
  
  ×
- Data visualizations using sound
  
  Jenny Bower - Keyboardist + Data Scientist
  
  Jenny Bower
  Data visualizations using sound
  
  Keyboardist + Data Scientist
  
  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.
  
  ×
- Narrative and Emotion: Insights from the Telephone Game
  
  Fritz Breithaupt - Provost Professor, Germanic Studies & Cognitive Science, Indiana University, Bloomington
  
  Fritz Breithaupt
  Narrative and Emotion: Insights from the Telephone Game
  
  Provost Professor, Germanic Studies & Cognitive Science, Indiana University, Bloomington
  
  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.
  
  ×
- The science of stories and sentiment analysis
  
  Chris Danforth - University of Vermont, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Flint Professor of Mathematical, Natural, and Technical Sciences.
  
  Chris Danforth
  The science of stories and sentiment analysis
  
  University of Vermont, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Flint Professor of Mathematical, Natural, and Technical Sciences
  
  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.
  
  ×
- Introduction to the Science of Stories
  
  Peter Dodds - Director, Vermont Complex Systems Center
  
  Peter Dodds
  Introduction to the Science of Stories
  
  Director, Vermont Complex Systems Center
  
  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.
  
  ×
- Forces that change culturally-transmitted data sets over time and how culture emerges from interacting individuals and is continually reshaped by them.
  
  Vanessa Ferdinand - Omidyar Postdoctoral Fellow, Santa Fe Institute
  
  Vanessa Ferdinand
  Forces that change culturally-transmitted data sets over time and how culture emerges from interacting individuals and is continually reshaped by them.
  
  Omidyar Postdoctoral Fellow, Santa Fe Institute
  
  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 makes 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. Because artifacts and behaviors are never directly copied, but are always reverse engineered via repeated cycles of perception, processing, and production, cognitive biases create selection pressures on culture. Her PhD addressed language as a prime example of a culturally evolving system and focused on the selective elimination of variation in language, known as regularization, as well as identified special concerns in modeling drift of cultural artifacts over time. Currently, she is working on appropriate baseline models of drift in culturally evolving systems and exploring the coevolutionary dynamics of culture and cognition.
  
  She holds a PhD in language evolution from the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Simon Kirby and Kenny Smith, a MSc in cognitive science from the University of Amsterdam, supervised by Jelle Zuidema, and dual-major BA in anthropology and linguistics from the University of Georgia. She attended SFI's Complex Systems Summer School in 2012.
  
  ×
- Communicating Complex Data to the Public
  
  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
  
  Mirta Galesic
  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.
  
  ×
- Applications of deep learning to narrative understanding.
  
  Mohit Iyyer -
  UMass Amherst, Assistant professor; AI2, Young Investigator at AI2
- Empathy and Social Connection in Story
  
  Sylvia Morelli - Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Director of the Empathy and Social Connection Lab.
  
  Sylvia Morelli
  Empathy and Social Connection in Story
  
  Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Director of the Empathy and Social Connection Lab.
  
  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.
  
  ×
- Folklore and Cultural Analytics
  
  Timothy Tangherlini - Professor, The Scandinavian Section and Dept. of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA
  
  Timothy Tangherlini
  Folklore and Cultural Analytics
  
  Professor, The Scandinavian Section and Dept. of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA
  
  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.
  
  ×
Additions to speaker list coming soon!

Symposium Organizer
Juniper Lovato
Director of Outreach for Complex Systems
UVM Complex Systems Center

Symposium Organizer
Juniper Lovato
Director of Outreach for Complex Systems
UVM Complex Systems Center

Contact:
juniper.lovato@uvm.edu

At the Vermont Complex Systems Center, Juniper works across generations and geographical limits to make resources and knowledge on cutting-edge complexity science more accessible to those with a hunger and curiosity for learning and exploration. Juniper came to Burlington in 2018. She previously served as the Director of Education for the Santa Fe Institute, an independent complexity science research center. She is also a co-founder of MAKE Santa Fe, a not-for-profit community makerspace in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Juniper received her Master’s in the Western Classics from St. John’s College in 2013 where she completed a thesis on the nature of pleasure in work in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

×
Participants
- Amir Barghi, Professor Mathematics and Statistics, Saint Miichael's College
- Benjamin Wiggins, University of Vermont
- Clyde Dunton-Gallagher, Dept of Art & Philosophy, Miami Dade College
- Dan DeSanto, University of Vermont
- Donna Rizzo, Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering, UVM
- Greta Pangborn, Professor Computer Science, Saint Miichael's College
- Guillermo Rodriguez, Linguistics, University of Vermont
- Jim Hefferon, Professor Mathematics and Statistics, Saint Miichael's College
- Kelly Gothard, University of Vermont Undergraduate Data Science Student
- Ryan Best, Capital One Data Science
- Selene Colburn, Associate Library Professor, University of Vermont
- Stephanie Albaugh, University of Vermont Extension
Further Reading
- Coming Soon!
Restaurant Guide
- Hen of the Wood - Farm to Table - 55 Cherry Street Burlington Vermont M-SU 5-10PM. Reservations suggested. $$$
- Honey Road - Middle Eastern Cuisine - 156 Church St Burlington, VT 05401 M-SU 4-9PM. Reservations suggested. $$
- Four Corners of the Earth - Amazing Gourmet Sandwiches - 310 Pine St, Burlington, VT 05401 TH-S 12-10PM SU 12-6 M12-4PM. $$
- Monarch & the Milkweed - Cocktails, Brunch and Bakery - M-SU 8AM-11PM. $$
- Juniper Bar & Restaurant - American Cuisine - 41 Cherry St Burlington, VT 05401 M-SU 7AM-2PM 5-10PM. $$
- Misery Loves Company - Cocktails and Farm to Table Cuisine. 46 Main St Winooski, VT 05404. T-F 3-10PM S 10AM-10PM SU 10SM-2PM. $$
Breweries
- Zero Gravity - Brewery - 716 Pine St Burlington, VT 05401 SU-TH 12-9PM F-S 12-10PM
- Foam - Brewery - 112 Lake St Burlington, VT 05401 M-TH 12-9PM S-SU 12-11PM SU 12-7PM
- Switchback - Brewery - 160 Flynn Ave Burlington, VT 05406 M-S 11AM-8PM SU 11am-7PM
- Magic Hat - Brewery - 5 Bartlett Bay Rd South Burlington, VT 05403 M-S 11AM-7PM SU 12-5PM
LOCAL ACTIVITY GUIDE
- Shelburne Farms - Beautiful working farm
- Stowe - Mountain Resort and Ski Lodge
- Church Street Marketplace - shopping and dining
- Causeway Bike-ride - a bike path that actually goes into Lake Champlain, which ends in a bike ferry and is amazing.
- Sailing Center - Rent a boat and take a nice ride through Lake Champlain
- Burlington Farmers' Market - grab some amazing local produce and goods from our amazing farmers market

Subscribe to Mailing List