First, this Friday’s seminar will occur at a slightly earlier time than normal: 11:45am-12:45pm. Please use the usual Zoom link.

This Friday’s seminar presentation will be our first external talk given by Prof. Peter Sheridan Dodds (UVM). Peter will be presenting on “Ousiometrics and Telegnomics: Distant measurement of historical timelines, story turbulence, and essential meaning.” The talk will cover how to leverage collective utterances (e.g., tweets) to quantify societal well-being, cultural trends, and the emergence/spread of stories. Peter’s research focuses on system-level, big data problems in many areas including language and stories, sociotechnical systems, Earth sciences, biology, and ecology. Peter has created (and constantly evolves) a series of complex systems courses starting with Principles of Complex Systems. He co-runs the Computational Story Lab with Chris Danforth which is known for “blatantly fun research.” For those interested, (completely optional) related background reading includes: Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market (Science. aka the Music Lab study), The geography of happiness: Connecting Twitter sentiment and expression, demographics, and objective characteristics of place (Plos ONE), and Human language reveals a universal positivity bias (PNAS)