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Research¶
Research Interests¶
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The cognitive science of culture and stories.
- How does culture, religion, and narrative affect cultural evolution?
- By what mechanisms does our mind process and reconstruct various narratives?
- How does cultural evolution drive the evolution of narratives?
- What is the role of novelty in the evolution of narratives?
- How does novelty affect the successful spreading of narratives?
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Patterns of novel thinking, collaboration, information spreading, and cooperation.
- Aim to understand how narrative structures or ritual practices affect these patterns in social/collective/individual cognition.
- Aim to understand how narrative structures or ritual practices affect these patterns in social/collective/individual cognition.
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The development of NLP and NLU methods for computational narrative analysis.
- Research how concepts from cognitive science, information theory, embedding methods, digital humanities, and network science can help us better understand narratives computationally.
Statement¶
I plan to improve pro-social and innovative aspects of various communities by understanding their community structure, the effects of common/shared narratives, and cultural/narrative evolution. I also plan to improve and develop novel NLP/NLU methods for narrative analysis to aid in these endeavors.
Current Projects (Any titles are working titles)¶
- Article with Anthony (Tony) Beavers on phenomenology, 4E cognition, and the cognitive science of religion (in progress)
- The Fit Get Fitter: How Cultural Bias and False Cultural Priors Could Help Individuals and Communities Learn More About the World (in progress, poster presented)
- Information Control and Concurrent Identity Fusion: Uncovering Causal Mechanisms of Identity Fusion and Predicting Extremism Through the Computational Analysis of Large Cultural Datasets (data collection)
- Sameness entices, but novelty enchants in fanfiction online (preprint on arXiv)
