What's the Difference Between a Story and an Idea?

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Ayoel: How do you get out the stories that people are expressing around an event as it happens? And there may be long terms, so say, the parklan shootings, shooting i happened. It's a terrible event, just a pur out of the many a how do you sort of track the stories that emanate from that? Ayoel: I'm certainly willing to believe that a good, compelling narrative wins every day over a set of facts, how true they are.

A good story takes you on an emotional journey, with ups and downs along the way. Thanks to science, we can quantify that. Peter Dodds works on understanding the structure of stories and other strings of words (including Twitter) by analyzing the valence of individual words, then studying how they are strung together in different kinds of stories. Understanding these structures offers powerful insight into how people communicate and how to reach them. As Peter says, “Never bring statistics to a story fight.”

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Peter Dodds received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently a professor of computer science at the University of Vermont and Director of the Vermont Complex Systems Center. He has won multiple teaching awards, and was elected a Fellow of the Network Science Society.

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