In 1995, Newt Gingrich’s team circulated a memo, containing a list of words to be used for Republican messaging. These included terms like “common sense, family, pride, and freedom.” Gingrich later described his goal as nothing less than “reshaping the entire nation through the news media.”¹ Historians agree these terms had an impact. But to what extent and how? To answer that question, we propose to treat the memo as a natural experiment in “keyword injection.” We then analyze the congressional record to capture the dynamics of term diffusion, revealing a pattern of influence over time. [read more]

Vaccine hesitancy is not simply a matter of ignorance. Communities around the country are reluctant to vaccinate for all sorts of reasons: personal, religious, political, medical. By studying the language of vaccine-related conversations online–using computational analysis–our team of data and language researchers are revealing the deep seated causes of vaccine hesitancy, with the hope of improving vaccine messaging and ultimately increasing uptake. [read more]

In this paper, I propose to reconsider theories of diegetic space which rely on explicit framing (i.e. “two people walk into a room” or “in Spain”). Rather than looking for maps, I define space in terms of grammatical categories denoting objects. The emphasis on objects leads to a method for literary archaeology, informed by cognitive theory and anthropology. [read more]

State-of-the-art methods for detecting literary characters often rely on features such as named entities (i.e. Heathcliff), gender attributes, and evidence of direct speech or sentience.¹ The house in Bleak House (1952–1853) by Charles Dickens, the wheat and the Railroad Commission in The Octopus (1901) by Frank Norris, and the airport in Arthur Hailey’s Airport (1968) are not characters by these measures. Yet we intuit them to act vitally and to exert an almost hypnotic influence on the action of the novel: “a strange beast that pertains to no one in particular and who is nobody’s responsibility.”² [read more]