The Google Books project is a wonderful, vital enterprise with the potential to open up new quantitative ways to deeply explore culture, history, and language. And so it was with much anticipatory rubbing of hands together that we dove into the data set to see what we could find about the evolution of language. And then, after some standard suffering, and with much …
Hashtags on Twitter have become well established as a way for people to come together around seemingly any topic. Hashtags allow us to collectively tell jokes (#IceCreamAMovie), mark celebrations (#HappyNewYear), refer to sports (#SuperBowl51, #IPL), and engage in (or enrage about) politics (insert your hashtag here). Hashtags are clickable catchphrases. For social and …
How do we quantify the well-being of a population in real time? Traditionally, we’ve done so with a mixture of key economic indicators, from GDP to consumer confidence indices. But are people happy? Do they believe their lives—their personal stories—are going well? Do they have hope for the future? More than 2 billion people use social media such as Twitter, …
On January 21st, 2017, the Women’s March on Washington gathered enormous crowds in collective protest of the newly inaugurated President of the United States, Donald Trump. Meanwhile on Twitter, people used the hashtag #WomensMarch to magnify and respond to the on-the-ground movement. Here at the Computational Story Lab, we found ourselves wondering about a few things. How …
What is the shape of all knowledge? How has knowledge grown over time? Can we anticipate ways in which knowledge will grow? Knowledge is certainly hierarchically structured but it’s also richly scaffolded and networked with concepts and ideas linking within and across domains. We can attempt to answer some of these questions by computationally exploring the Network of …
Each game is a story If you pay much attention to news of any kind, it’s almost impossible to go a day without hearing about some sporting event going on in the world. Annual competitions like the Super Bowl and Major League Baseball’s World Series mark the culmination of grueling seasons for athletes and fans alike. Almost every hour of every day plays host to some sporting …
Climate change is real, and that’s just science. But if we aren’t feeling climate change on a day-to-day basis, then how do we know it’s really happening? The problem is especially challenging considering that weather in the U.S. has actually become more pleasant over the last few decades. Behavioral economics studies have repeatedly shown that human beings respond best to …
There is an overwhelming consensus among scientists that anthropogenic climate change is real. However, politicians often benefit from disagreeing with this consensus, and media coverage tends to confuse the general public. With a myriad of different ideas, opinions, and sentiments surrounding this controversial topic, we were curious, what does Twitter think about climate …
Reporting on the August 9, 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown, David Carr concluded his August 17 piece for the New York Times by observing that "nothing much good was happening in Ferguson until it became a hashtag”. Following the story's rise and spread on Twitter, the protests in Missouri swiftly captured the news cycle in the U.S., and brought into focus the consequences …
Note: a version of this post was given by the author for Invocation at the UVM College of Engineering & Mathematical Sciences graduation ceremony, Flynn Theatre, May 18, 2014. A few weeks ago—on one of those beautiful spring mornings that makes the long winter seem like it happened elsewhere—something quite remarkable took place here at the University of Vermont. At the …
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