research
Research interests, current projects, and miscellaneous visualizations.
Research Interests
- The cognitive science and evolution of culture, stories, and religion.
- How does cultural evolution drive the evolution of narratives and vice versa?
- What is the role of narrative in identity fusion?
- How do stories, identity, and ontological concepts affect the phenomenology of reality?
- 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.
- Natural Language Processing, Understanding (NLP/NLU), and Culturomics
- Research how concepts from cognitive science, information theory, embedding methods, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), large language models (LLM), digital humanities, and network science can help us develop novel culturomics and NLP/NLU methods for cultural analysis and comparative phenomenology.
- Research how concepts from cognitive science, information theory, embedding methods, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), large language models (LLM), digital humanities, and network science can help us develop novel culturomics and NLP/NLU methods for cultural analysis and comparative phenomenology.
Current Projects (Any titles are working titles)
- Encountering the Other in the Cognitive Science of Religion. An article with Anthony (Tony) Beavers on phenomenology, 4E cognition, and the cognitive science of religion (in progress)
- Exploring the Role of Theory of Mind in Experienced Reality: A Computational Comparative Phenomenology Approach. Working with Tanya Luhrmann (Stanford) and Eleanor B. Schille Hudson (Stanford) (early stages, data cleaning).
- Information Control and Concurrent Identity Fusion: Uncovering Causal Mechanisms of Identity Fusion and Predicting Extremism Through the Computational Analysis of Large Cultural Datasets. Current work with Jisun An and YY Ahn (methods paper 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)
- Sameness entices, but novelty enchants in fanfiction online (preprint on arXiv)
