Towards a Data-Driven Science of Stories

Stories are fundamental to how people comprehend, explain, and potentially shape their lives, the lives of others, and the world around them. In the millennia since Aristotle first formulated his theories of narrative, our world has become inundated with stories in formats that Aristotle never imagined: Books, screenplays, news and social media, podcasts, video games, and even administrative productions like university mission statements, all variously created by individuals, groups, and, increasingly, computational systems. The volume of stories has long exceeded what one person might be able to comprehend: No one can read 100 million tweets, a century’s worth of literature, or all the New York Times articles ever written. While narrative is a central concern across many academic disciplines, research on stories remains distributed across distinct scholarly communities, each bringing valuable but often divergent perspectives. Given our age of data and computational power, there is a now growing opportunity for making deep connections across the many approaches to understanding story.

Our working group will host one of the first gatherings of highly interdisciplinary scholars who engage in the computational study of narratives with the aim of synthesizing fundamental research questions and paradigms. In particular, we are interested in complex systems approaches toward questions such as: How do ecologies of stories evolve, and how can we equally analyze these evolutions in both high and low-resource languages? What drives stories to be impactful to readers or listeners? What makes stories spread? How can we model and infer the latent states propelling the narrative, whether they are cognitive states of the characters or biases of the narrator? Our workshop will include disciplinarily diverse participants, including computer scientists, statisticians, mathematicians, physicists, psychologists, economists, marketing experts, information scientists, cognitive neuroscientists, and folklorists.