How Much Back Engineering Can You Do When You See Something Strange Happening in the Dataofte S?

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The hedenometer is a web page that tracks the frequency of words in stories. It can be used to find out what happened on particular days and weeks. The site has entries for every date of history, as well as modern times. But it's not clear if there are objective procedures for figuring out why certain words appear more often than others.

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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