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What’s the Story?
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Power
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What’s the Story?Principles of Complex Systems | @pocsvoxCSYS/MATH 300, Fall, 2016 | #FallPoCS2016
Prof. Peter Dodds | @peterdodds
Dept. of Mathematics & Statistics | Vermont Complex Systems CenterVermont Advanced Computing Core | University of Vermont
What's the Story?
Principles ofComplex Systems
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Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
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These slides are brought to you by:
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Outline
Narrativium
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(Sir Terry) Pratchett’s Narrativium:
“The most common element on thedisc, although not included in the listof the standard five: earth, fire, air,water and surprise. It ensures thateverything runs properly as a story.”
“A little narrativium goes a long way:the simpler the story, the better youunderstand it. Storytelling is theopposite of reductionism: 26 lettersand some rules of grammar are nostory at all.”
“Heroes only win when outnumbered, and thingswhich have a one-in-a-million chance of succeedingoften do so.”
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The story trap by Philip Ball, 2015-11-12
“We use neat stories to explain everything from sportsmatches to symphonies. Is it time to leave the nursery of themind?”
“…we might wonder if the ultimate intelligibility of theuniverse will be determined not so much by the capacity ofour minds to formulate the appropriate concepts andequations, but by whether we can find a meaningful story totell about it.”
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Competing storytelling organizations: News. Art. Music industry. Books, magazines. Movie studios, Netflix, HBO, Disney. Video Games. Social media: Facebook, Medium, Tumblr, blogs.
Cultural products from Pantheon: Writers, artists, movie directors, video game
directors.
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Understanding the Sociotechnocene—Stories:
xkcd.com/904/
Perhaps: A true science of stories. Claim: Homo narrativus—we run
on stories. Claim: The narrative hierarchy and
the Scalability of stories. Research: Extraction of metaphors,
frames, narratives, and stories fromlarge-scale text.
Research: The taxonomy of humanstories.
Harness: Sociotechnical algorithmsfor measuring/predicting decisions,contagion, demographics, weather, …
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Adjacent narratives—why mistruths andconspiracy theories exist and flourish:
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1999 Gallup poll: 6% of Americans said the lunar landings were fake. 5% were undecided.
Video replay:
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Story Wars:
Nicholas Hénin,French Journalist,held captive for 10months.
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From the end of the interview:NICOLAS HENIN: No, it was just like in a movie. And, by the way,even the people going to Syria, joining ISIS in Syria to fight, eventhese people see himself as movie characters. They play theirown movie. This is why I think that the most powerful way tofight ISIS are not bombs. It is to kill the narrative. We have towrite another movie. We have to build other heroes. And this iswhy I believe that the French are making big mistakes in the waysthey, they fight ISIS.
We created, for instance, accounts on the social media named“Stop Jihadism,” and this is [BLEEP], like they did not understandanything. And I did understand why we are so bad. It’s justbecause in France we don’t know how to write TV series properly.
[BROOKE LAUGHS]
Just because we have no imagination, we cannot just tell beautifulstories, create beautiful characters, beautiful heroes.
And this is what we have to do because in our world, in oursocieties what do people want? They want to become heroes.They want to be famous. They want to be, to be recognized.
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The American Dream = Rags to Riches The story that anyone can become King or Queen. Story of individual, not the collective. But we know about fame and success:
The presence of outsized fame in a social systemmeans social imitation is a driver of value.
Stories of societies can only hold if they have beenand remain believable.
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If not Trump, what?, David Brooks, New YorkTimes:“We’ll probably need a new national story. Up untilnow, America’s story has been some version of therags-to-riches story, the lone individual who risesfrom the bottom through pluck and work. But thatstory isn’t working for people anymore, especially forpeople who think the system is rigged.”
“I don’t know what the new national story will be, butmaybe it will be less individualistic and moreredemptive. Maybe it will be a story aboutcommunities that heal those who suffer fromaddiction, broken homes, trauma, prison and loss, astory of those who triumph over the isolation, socialinstability and dislocation so common today.”
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Claim: Stories must have real substance toendure Enormous disasters: Fabrications of real
experiences. Plain old making stuff up: A million little pieces
... Oprah will get you. Wikipedia’s has a list of famous fake memoirs. Expansive plagiarism: How Opal Mehta Got
Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.#kudos
Self-plagiarism and more standard badness: JonahLehrer.Amazingly: Made up Bob Dylan quotes.
Lance Armstrong. Also got to meet Oprah.
Enormous power: Fiction that speaks to realexperiences.
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Kurt Vonnegut on the shapes of stories:
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Kurt Vonnegut on the shapes of stories:
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The New Yorker, December 16, 2013, p. 56.
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Ron Swanson: “I hate metaphors. That’s why my favorite book is
Moby Dick. No frou-frou symbolism. Just agood, simple tale about a man who hates ananimal.”
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The emotional shapes of stories—Moby Dick:
0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2
x 105
4
4.5
5
5.5
6
6.5
7
Word number i
havg
Moby Dick, ∆h=2.0, smoothing T=3162
0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2
x 105
5
5.2
5.4
5.6
5.8
6
6.2
6.4
6.6
Word number i
havg
Moby Dick, ∆h=2.0, smoothing T=10000
0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2
x 105
5.2
5.4
5.6
5.8
6
6.2
6.4
6.6
Word number i
havg
Moby Dick, ∆h=2.0, smoothing T=31623
−↑ missing
−↑ shot
−↑ poor
+↓ great
+↓ bed
−↑ die
−↑ evil
−↑ lonely
−↑ blind
fear −↓
−↑ cowards
sky +↑
−↑ hated
−↑ shooting
−↑ fatal
havg(Last 10%)=5.69< havg(Fir st 25%)=6.20
C
Σ +↓ Σ +↑
Σ −↑ Σ −↓
Σ
Partly inspired by Vonnegut’s Shapes of Stories.
Online, interactive Emotional Shapes of Stories for10,000+ books:
Online, interactive Emotional Shapes of Stories for10,000+ books:
Online, interactive Emotional Shapes of Stories for1,000+ movie scripts:
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http://whyfiles.org/2015/in-10-languages-happy-words-beat-sad-ones/
Reagan et al. in preparation, 2016.
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Harry Potter and the Chamber of Plot Devices:
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“The game story space of professionalsports: Australian Rules Football”Kiley, Reagan, Mitchell, Danforth, andDodds.Physical Review E, 93, 052314, 2016. [5]
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0
50
100
150
200
2/0.86
2AA
60
40
20
0
20
11/5.71
64AB
0
50
100
150
200
1/0.53
1AC
40
20
0
20
40
11/6.06
67AD
20
0
20
40
60
7/4.0
71AE
50
0
50
100
150
25/15.13
14AF
50
0
50
100
12/7.29
41AG
20
0
20
40
60
48/31.56
43AH
50
0
50
100
22/15.01
21AI
40
20
0
20
40
29/19.8
52AJ
50
0
50
100
46/32.1
29AK
50
0
50
100
150
19/13.8
10AL
50
0
50
100
32/23.33
13AM
40
20
0
20
40
34/25.59
65AN
20
0
20
40
19/14.34
53AO
50
0
50
7/5.46
40AP
40
20
0
20
40
34/26.54
49AQ
50
0
50
100
14/11.63
34AR
20
0
20
40
60
34/28.26
47AS
50
0
50
100
21/18.12
42AT
50
0
50
100
150
6/5.18
4AU
50
0
50
16/14.05
61AV
50
0
50
41/36.45
51AW
40
20
0
20
40
26/23.16
55AX
50
0
50
100
36/32.18
26AY
50
0
50
100
19/17.41
16AZ
50
0
50
100
25/22.95
17BA
20
0
20
40
60
37/34.16
44BB
0
50
100
150
200
3/2.79
3BC
50
0
50
100
24/22.44
27BD
50
0
50
100
35/32.98
30BE
50
0
50
100
24/22.62
18BF
20
0
20
40
60
24/23.08
37BG
50
0
50
100
3/2.94
15BH
50
0
50
100
35/34.41
35BI
50
0
50
100
19/18.76
22BJ
20
0
20
40
60
14/13.85
60BK
20
0
20
40
29/29.28
58BL
50
0
50
100
20/20.66
19BM
50
0
50
100
2/2.1
25BN
50
0
50
100
13/13.83
57BO
40
20
0
20
40
27/28.95
59BP
0
50
100
150
6/6.47
5BQ
40
20
0
20
40
16/17.29
70BR
40
20
0
20
11/11.89
69BS
50
0
50
100
150
7/7.66
9BT
50
0
50
100
14/15.39
12BU
50
0
50
13/14.3
66BV
20
0
20
40
60
19/21.24
46BW
50
0
50
100
150
9/10.1
8BX
20
0
20
40
60
15/16.98
63BY
40
20
0
20
40
7/8.05
68BZ
20
0
20
40
60
19/22.2
38CA
50
0
50
100
17/20.17
31CB
20
0
20
40
60
25/29.73
39CC
40
20
0
20
40
12/14.69
56CD
50
0
50
100
150
10/12.69
11CE
50
0
50
100
26/33.43
33CF
50
0
50
100
150
10/12.88
7CG
50
0
50
100
14/18.46
28CH
20
0
20
40
60
25/33.73
48CI
20
0
20
40
60
13/17.8
45CJ
20
0
20
40
19/26.26
62CK
50
0
50
100
11/16.68
32CL
50
0
50
100
150
8/12.95
6CM
50
0
50
100
12/20.74
24CN
0 30 60 90 12040
20
0
20
40
20/36.06
54CO
0 30 60 90 12020
0
20
40
15/28.25
50CP
0 30 60 90 12020
0
20
40
60
9/17.19
36CQ
0 30 60 90 12050
0
50
100
12/24.7
23CR
0 30 60 90 12050
0
50
100
10/22.67
20CS
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The very tiresome Great Man Theory:
“The Power of Myth”by Campbell and Moyers (1991). [4]
“The Hero with a Thousand Faces”by Joseph Campbell (2008). [3]
Highly influential but it’s a trap!
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How to write a screenplay:
“Save the Cat!”by Blake Snyder (2005). [6]
9 acts. Someone important to the main characters gets
toasted in the second act, blah, blah. Believes irony is key. Logline = one or two sentence summary. Logline fails to be a summary of logline.
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Seven “good” stories?:
“The Seven Basic Plots: Why We TellStories”by Christopher Booker (2005). [2]
Seven Gateways to the Underworld (?) Overcoming the Monster ×2 and the Thrilling
escape from Death (plot). Rags to Riches (plot). The Quest (plot). Voyage and Return (plot). Comedy ×2 (plot but really structure). Tragedy ×3 (plot). Rebirth (plot). The Dark Power: From Shadow into Light (master
structure).
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The taxonomy of stories:
Folkloristics: Academic area formally
started around 1900. Aarne–Thompson
classificationsystems
Motif-based taxonomy. Online classification
database
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60 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM | JULY 2012 | VOL. 55 | NO. 7
contributed articles
DOI:10.1145/2209249.2209267
A searchable meta-graph can connect even troublesome house elves and other supernatural beings to scholarly folk categories.
BY JAMES ABELLO, PETER BROADWELL,
AND TIMOTHY R. TANGHERLINI
Computational Folkloristics
Japan). By exploring the traditional
expressions of group members across
time and space, scholars can develop
a sophisticated understanding of the
complex processes of culture develop-
ment and change.
Since inception of the field in the
19th century, folkloristics has been
based on a three-part process: ˲ Fieldwork consisting of the identi-
fication of a folk group and the collec-
tion of its traditions; ˲ Archiving, editing, and publishing
these collections; and ˲ Analyzing the collected folklore
based on a single or combination of
multiple theoretical perspectives.
For the most part, folklorists limit
their studies to small, well-defined
collections or subsets of much larger
collections. A study corpus is often
selected based on criteria like genre
or topic. The “variants” in the result-
ing study corpus are then subjected to
“close readings”; from an ethnograph-
ic perspective, close readings focus on
analysis of the symbolic aspects of the
expression as an important meaning-
making process for storytellers and
their audiences. Conclusions drawn
from close readings are subsequently
abstracted to make more general com-
ments about the changing contours of
the cultural ideology of the group in
question. This approach has worked
well for generations of folklorists, par-
ticularly in the context of the relatively
small size of accessible collections
and the general alignment of research
THE STUDY OF folklore, or folkloristics, is predicated on two premises: traditional expressive culture circulates across and within social networks, and discrete “performances” of traditional expressive forms serve an important role as the locus for the ongoing negotiation of cultural ideology (norms, beliefs, and values). The underlying assumption is that folklore emerges from the dialectic tension between individual members of a cultural group on the one hand and the “traditions” of that group on the other. This ongoing tug-of-war ensures that traditional expressive culture is constantly changing, adjusting to the needs of the individuals within a group.
The goal of any folkloristic investigation is to understand how traditional expressions create meaning for the people who create and receive them; studies range from a consideration of fairy-tale telling by 19th-century peasants (such as in the classic works of the Grimm brothers) to analysis of rumor propagation in the aftermath of disasters (such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the 2011 tsunami in
key insights
The field of computational folkloristics
weds algorithmic approaches to classic
interpretive problems from the field of
folklore.
A multimodal network representation of
a folklore corpus (hypergraphs) liberates
folklore exploration from the limitations
of existing classification schemes.
Imagine a system in which the
complexities of a folklore corpus can be
explored at different levels of resolution,
from the broad perspective of “distant
reading” down to the narrow perspective
of traditional “close reading.”
“Computational folkloristics”Abello, Broadwell, and Tangherlini,Communications of the ACM, 55, 60–70, 2012. [1]
Motivation: “As a simple, historical example from the Danishmaterials, no one has yet classified (according to the ATUindex) the several thousand fairy tales in the collections ofthe Danish Folklore Archive (http://www.dafos.dk), nordoes it seem anyone ever will.”
‘Imagine a system in which the complexities of a folklorecorpus can be explored at different levels of resolution, fromthe broad perspective of “distant reading” down to thenarrow perspective of traditional “close reading.”’
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The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood
Jamshid J. Tehrani*
Department of Anthropology and Centre for the Coevolution of Biology and Culture, Durham University, Science Site, South Road, Durham, United Kingdom
Abstract
Researchers have long been fascinated by the strong continuities evident in the oral traditions associated with differentcultures. According to the ‘historic-geographic’ school, it is possible to classify similar tales into ‘‘international types’’ andtrace them back to their original archetypes. However, critics argue that folktale traditions are fundamentally fluid, and thatmost international types are artificial constructs. Here, these issues are addressed using phylogenetic methods that wereoriginally developed to reconstruct evolutionary relationships among biological species, and which have been recentlyapplied to a range of cultural phenomena. The study focuses on one of the most debated international types in theliterature: ATU 333, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. A number of variants of ATU 333 have been recorded in European oraltraditions, and it has been suggested that the group may include tales from other regions, including Africa and East Asia.However, in many of these cases, it is difficult to differentiate ATU 333 from another widespread international folktale, ATU123, ‘The Wolf and the Kids’. To shed more light on these relationships, data on 58 folktales were analysed using cladistic,Bayesian and phylogenetic network-based methods. The results demonstrate that, contrary to the claims made by critics ofthe historic-geographic approach, it is possible to identify ATU 333 and ATU 123 as distinct international types. They furthersuggest that most of the African tales can be classified as variants of ATU 123, while the East Asian tales probably evolved byblending together elements of both ATU 333 and ATU 123. These findings demonstrate that phylogenetic methods providea powerful set of tools for testing hypotheses about cross-cultural relationships among folktales, and point towards excitingnew directions for research into the transmission and evolution of oral narratives.
Citation: Tehrani JJ (2013) The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood. PLoS ONE 8(11): e78871. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0078871
Editor: R. Alexander Bentley, Bristol University, United Kingdom
Received July 30, 2013; Accepted September 20, 2013; Published November 13, 2013
Copyright: � 2013 Jamshid J. Tehrani. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permitsunrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: The author was supported by an RCUK Fellowship during a part of the time in which the research was carried out. The funders had no role in studydesign, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
Competing Interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.
* E-mail: [email protected]
Introduction
The publication of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Children’s and
Household Tales (1812–1814) [1] two hundred years ago sparked
enormous public and academic interest in traditional stories told
among ‘‘the common people’’, and helped establish folklore as a
field for serious academic inquiry. Inspired by the Grimms’
methods, a new generation of researchers ventured outside the
library and into the villages and households of the rural peasantry
to collect colourful tales of magical beasts, wicked stepmothers,
enchanted objects, and indefatigable heroes [2]. One of the most
unexpected and exciting discoveries to emerge from these studies
was the recurrence of many of the same plots in the oral traditions
associated with different – and often widely separated – societies
and ethnic groups. Thus, the Brothers Grimm noted that many of
the ostensibly ‘‘German’’ folktales which they compiled are
recognisably related to stories recorded in Slavonic, Indian,
Persian and Arabic oral traditions [3]. These similarities have
attracted the attention of folklorists, literary scholars, anthropol-
ogists, cognitive scientists and others for a variety of reasons: For
example, cognate tales in other cultures have been studied to try
and reconstruct the origins and forms of classic western fairy tales
before they were first written down [2] [4]. Other researchers have
examined the distributions of common plot elements within and
across regions to make inferences about past migration, cross-
cultural contact, and the impact of geographical distance and
language barriers on cultural diffusion [5] [6]. Last, it has been
suggested that patterns of stability and change in stories can
furnish rich insights into universal and variable aspects of the
human experience, and reveal how psychological, social and
ecological processes interact with one another to shape cultural
continuity and diversity [7] [8] [9].
Unfortunately, since folktales are mainly transmitted via oral
rather than written means, reconstructing their history and
development across cultures has proven to be a complex challenge.
To date, the most ambitious and sustained effort in this area has
been carried out by folklorists associated with the so-called
‘‘historic-geographic’’ school, which was established toward the
end of the nineteenth century [10]. These researchers have sought
to classify similar folktales from different oral literatures into
distinct ‘‘international types’’ based on consistencies in their
themes, plots and characters. The most comprehensive and up-to-
date reference work in this field, the Aarne-Uther-Thompson
(ATU) index, identifies more than two thousand international
types distributed across three hundred cultures worldwide [11].
Exponents of the historic-geographic school believed that each
international type could be traced back to an original ‘‘archetype’’
tale that was inherited from a common ancestral population, or
spread across societies through trade, migration and conquest.
Over time, the tales’ original forms were then adapted to suit
different cultural norms and preferences, giving rise to locally
distinct ‘‘ecotypes’’ [5]. The historic-geographic method sought to
reconstruct this process by assembling all the known variants of the
international type and sorting them by region and chronology.
Rare or highly localised forms were considered to be of likely
PLOS ONE | www.plosone.org 1 November 2013 | Volume 8 | Issue 11 | e78871
“The phylogeny of Little Red RidingHood”Jamshid J. Tehrani,PLoS ONE, 8, e78871, 2013. [7]
ATU 123
53
59
49
59
13
62
35
13
1322
23
18
13
8
25
20
26
13
24
12
11
17
19
84
11
1461
22
5
67
9328
20
21
33
78
27
75
69
77
65
AFRICAN
63
ATU 333
12
43
38
87
87
33
EAST ASIAN
44
33
47
Aesop1
Aesop2
Grimm
RH1RH2
RH3
IranIbo
Perrault
GM1GM3
GM2
GM4
Liege
Catt2
Catt3Catt5
Catt1
Catt4TG1Huang
TG6TG5
TG4
TG2TG3
TG12TG13
TG14
TG9
TG7TG11 TG10
TG8
India
WK9
WK5
Africa1
Africa2
Africa4
Africa5Antigua
Africa3 WK16
WK1
WK4
WK11
WK13
WK8
WK10WK7
WK12
WK17
WK3
WK2
WK14
WK15WK6
Figure 2. Majority-rules consensus of the most parsimonious trees returned by the cladistic analysis of the tales. Major groupings arelabelled by region or ATU international type and indicated by the coloured nodes. Sub-types are indicated in the taxa labels (RH = Little Red RidingHood; GM = Story of Grandmother; Catt = Catterinella; WK = The Wolf and the Kids; TG = Tiger Grandmother). Variants by particular authors, orfrom countries/ethnic groups that are discussed in the text have individual labels. Numbers beside the edges represent the level of support forindividual clades returned by the bootstrap analysis.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0078871.g002
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Famous folklore scholar:
Comic Book Guy(CBG).
Real name: Jeffrey“Jeff” Albertson.
Master’s degree inFolklore andMythology.
Thesis: translatedLord of the Rings intoKlingon.
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The taxonomy of stories:
Fundamental arcs: Kill the Monster. Rags to Riches (and Riches to
Rags—Metamophosis). The Journey: a Search or a Quest. Romance. Narratives in Left Nullspace: All Stories of The
Many.
What about comedies? Comedies are not in themselves a story, but a way
of telling stories.
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Stories are algorithms for life:Homo narrativus: Provide dynamic paths and trajectories. If this, then that. Convey and reinforce how to behave, how not to
behave. Full ecology of stories =
Competing, self-defending operating system forpeople’s minds.
Aphorisms as algorithms: Pride cometh before the fall. A stitch in time saves nine. Look before you leap. Anti-aphorism: The one who hesitates is lost.
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The unifying theme of existence isexistence:
The three fundamental events of (non-clone) life:
Hatchings. Matchings. Dispatchings.
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The essence of all stories?
It’s survival—Life and Death: Kill the Monster: Bare survival. Rags to Riches: Flourishing. Romance: Matchings and Hatchings. Journey/Odyssey: Search for a salvation, a “Holy
Grail”.
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References I
[1] J. Abello, P. Broadwell, and T. R. Tangherlini.Computational folkloristics.Communications of the ACM, 55:60–70, 2012.pdf
[2] C. Booker.The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories.Continuum, 2005.
[3] J. Campbell.The Hero with a Thousand Faces.New World Lbirary, third edition, 2008.
[4] J. Campbell and B. Moyers.The Power of Myth.Anchor, 1991. pdf
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References II
[5] D. P. Kiley, A. J. Reagan, L. Mitchell, C. M. Danforth,and P. S. Dodds.The game story space of professional sports:Australian Rules Football.Physical Review E, 93, 2016.To appear. Available online athttp://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03886. pdf
[6] B. Snyder.Save the Cat!Michael Wiese Productions, 2005.
[7] J. J. Tehrani.The phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood.PLoS ONE, 8:e78871, 2013. pdf
