SFI Research News:

From Beowulf to Pride and Prejudice to the classic sitcom Friends, all stories share a common purpose: to convey knowledge about how to navigate the world.

“Stories are everywhere,” said SFI External Professor Peter Dodds, a systems scientist at the University of Vermont. “Even sports, or the differential equations that describe fluid dynamics, are kinds of storytellers. Stories that people tell and retell almost always involve characters and events that are connected and unfold over time, wrapped around essences of power, danger, and survival.”

Dodds has co-organized a working group aimed at moving “Towards a Data-Driven Science of Stories.” From December 10 to 12, computer scientists, folklorists, physicists, marketing experts, cognitive neuroscientists, economists, mathematicians, psychologists, and other researchers will convene at SFI to connect different approaches to understanding stories.

“We want to illuminate the spectrum of stories across time and cultures, just like other fields have found spectrums of stars, species, or words,” Dodds said.

In a world where large language models like ChatGPT achieve feats no human can, conceivably capable of ingesting the entire New York Times archive or a century’s worth of literature, it might seem easy to pick out story patterns. But truly building a cohesive science of stories requires explanatory tools from fields like complex-systems research.

“Explaining a joke kills the humor, and we don’t want to make stories dull by studying them. Our working group will explore new explanatory models and computational tools, drawing from complex-systems science, to develop a science of stories that honors what a story is, and doesn’t reduce it to a bag of words,” said Sam Zhang, a University of Vermont statistician and recent SFI Applied Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow.

Zhang co-organized the working group with Dodds, alongside novelist and University of Toronto marketing professor Samsun Knight, and University of Vermont computer scientist Juniper Lovato.

Participants at the working group hope to devise methods for mapping story plots. They want to create visual representations of how characters, environment, and events form networks over time, and capture the flavors of interaction between characters. Another goal is to develop a rich common dataset of stories that researchers can experiment with to identify fundamental story features.

“How do we take 100,000 stories, computationally turn them into temporal networks of characters, and then have a whole bunch of species to look at?” Dodds explained.

A data-driven understanding will help address the many applications of stories — positive and negative. After all, stories do far more than entertain. Consider propaganda about kings or states that establishes a national narrative, viral stories that captivate the globe, marketing that drives sales, and conspiracy theories.

“Stories are storehouses of knowledge, but they are also instruments of power,” Dodds said. “Fictional characters matter because real character matters. By using data to develop a science of stories, we can best identify and account for the power of stories in the real world.”

SFI Mission:

Searching for Order in the Complexity of Evolving Worlds

Our researchers endeavor to understand and unify the underlying, shared patterns in complex physical, biological, social, cultural, technological, and even possible astrobiological worlds. Our global research network of scholars spans borders, departments, and disciplines, unifying curious minds steeped in rigorous logical, mathematical, and computational reasoning. As we reveal the unseen mechanisms and processes that shape these evolving worlds, we seek to use this understanding to promote the well-being of humankind and of life on earth.