Wednesdays@NICO Seminar | 12:00-1:00 PM, September 30, 2015 | Chambers Hall, Lower Level

Peter Sheridan Dodds, Director, Complex Systems Center & Professor, Mathematics & Statistics, University of Vermont

Measuring the Happiness, Health, and Stories of Populations

Abstract

In this talk, I will discuss our work on building what we call "lexical meters"---online instruments that use social media and other texts to quantify population rates of a wide array of human behaviour such as wealth, exercise levels, obesity rates, and sleep insufficiency. I will first showcase our hedonometer, an instrument for measuring positivity in written expression. I'll show how we have consistently improved our methods to allow us to explore collective, dynamical patterns of happiness found in massive text corpora including Twitter, song lyrics, works of literature, movies, political speeches, and news sources. I will present evidence for how 10 diverse natural languages appear to contain a striking frequency-independent positive bias, describing how this phenomenon plays a key role in our instrument's performance, and how it may more deeply reflects human nature. I will then discuss our work on building the Panometer, introducing our latest instrument: the Lexicocalorimeter, a principled meter that turns phrases into calories. Finally, I will point to a number other diverse projects being carried by our team in the Computational Story Lab, ranging from the stories of sports to the dynamics of climate change.

Bio

Peter Sheridan Dodds is a Professor at the University of Vermont (UVM) working on system-level problems in many fields, ranging from sociology to physics. He is Director of the UVM's Complex Systems Center, co-Director of UVM's Computational Story Lab, and a visiting faculty fellow at the Vermont Advanced Computing Core. He maintains general research and teaching interests in complex systems and networks with a current focus on sociotechnical and psychological phenomena including collective emotional states, contagion, language, and stories. His methods encompass large-scale sociotechnical experiments, large-scale data collection and analysis, and the formulation, analysis, and simulation of theoretical models. Dodds's training is in theoretical physics, mathematics, and electrical engineering with extensive formal postdoctoral and research experience in the social sciences. Dodds has received funding from NSF, NASA, ONR, and the MITRE Corporation, among others, notably being awarded an NSF CAREER by the Social and Economic Sciences Directorate.

Email nico@northwestern.edu if you would like to meet with Professor Dodds.

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