Witches, Pizzas, and the Politics of Storytelling: Toward a Generative Model of Social Stories
Guest lecture by Professor Timothy R. Tangherlini, UCLA
In the lead up to the US presidential election, two competing narratives of political scandal took hold: Bridgegate and Pizzagate. The former was based on an actual political cover-up while the latter was a fictive narrative that cast Hillary Clinton’s campaign as party to a child sex ring.
The structure of the Pizzagate narrative reveals an important aspects of the dynamics of storytelling across social networks. As such, these internet rumors – "fake news" in contemporary parlance – allow us to model the folkloric genre of legend (sagn) and its hyperactive sibling, rumor, at very large scale.
In this presentation, I present a generative model of legend, using three target domains – Danish legends about witchcraft, Internet stories about vaccination hesitancy, and the Pizzagate “fake news” stories. I show how relatively straightforward computational methods can be used to discover the domain, extract the main actants and relationships, and derive a generative narrative framework that supports storytelling. The mutually constitutive relationship between a rapidly stabilizing narrative framework and the performance level instantiation of individual storytelling performances helps explain the observed phenomena of stability and variation. This approach has great potential for both archival research and contemporaneous research on the ideology of storytelling in politically fraught environments.
About Tim Tangherlini
Timothy R. Tangherlini is a Professor at UCLA. He holds a joint appointment in the Dept. of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Scandinavian Section.
A folklorist and ethnographer by training, he is the author of Danish Folktales, Legends and Other Stories, and has also published widely in academic journals, including The Journal of American Folklore, Western Folklore, Journal of Folklore Research, Folklore, Scandinavian Studies, Danske Studier, PlosOne, Computer and Communications of the Association for Computing Machines.
He has produced three documentary films and acted as consultant on documentaries and films for Disney Animation, National Geographic Television, National Geographic Specials and PBS. He recently directed a semester long program on Culture Analytics at NSF’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics.
His current work focuses on computational approaches to problems in the study of literature and culture. He is the president of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, and a Fellow of the American Folklore Society. His research has been funded by the NEH, the NSF, the NIH, the Mellon Foundation, the Nordic Council of Ministers, the Korea Foundation, the American Scandinavian Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Google.