Speaker:
Timothy Tangherlini, Elizabeth H. and Eugene A. Shurtleff Chair in Undergraduate Education, Distinguished Professor in the Dept. of Scandinavian and the School of Information, University of California, Berkeley
Title:
Chat Agents, Conspiracy Theory & Threat Narratives: Cultural Analytics and Narrative at Scale
Abstract:
In this talk, I present current work on the intersection of conspiracy theory and narratives of threat, with the shifting terrain of chat bots increasingly influencing the social media ecosystem. I present a generative model of narratives of threat, explore aspects of stance detection and the narrative sorting of actants and institutions into "insiders" and "outsiders." I then explore the topology of conspiracy theory as a narrative predilection for a comprehensive explanation of allegedly witnessed or experienced phenomena along with inferences about connections based on a monologic world view. Using examples from earlier political social media discussions, and updating these observations in the context of contemporaneous debates about the role of AI in society allow for insight into the thicket of connections that characterize the ongoing negotiation of belief through narrative
Speaker Bio:
Timothy R. Tangherlini, Elizabeth H. and Eugene A. Shurtleff Chair of Undergraduate Education, is a Distinguished Professor in the Dept. of Scandinavian and the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also associate director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and the Faculty Director of the Berkeley Folklore Archive. He has worked on computational approaches to folklore, with an emphasis on stories and storytelling over the past three decades. Under the auspices of the NSF's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, he co-directed a program on Culture Analytics, as well as an NEH Institute on Network Analysis for the Humanities. He is the author of several books, and various articles. He has done extensive fieldwork on storytelling among paramedics, and shamanism in South Korea, as well as archival work on rural 19th century Denmark. His current work focuses on generative models of common story genres such as legend, rumor, personal experience narratives, and conspiracy theories, as well as understanding cultural phenomena such as dance and cuisine across many scales of analysis.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/95645191725
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, networks, and artificial intelligence. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Cost: Free
Emily Rosman
(847) 491-2527
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