RII Track-1: Harnessing the Data Revolution for Vermont: The Science of Online Corpora, Knowledge, and Stories (SOCKS)

“远距离阅读”涉及使用计算方法来分析文学文本。这是一个具有巨大未实现潜力的概念。例如，没有一个人可以阅读1亿条推文或一个世纪的文学作品或所有纽约时报的文章。然而，通过按比例放大和利用数据，可以创建一个远程阅读系统。“在线语料库、知识和故事的科学”（SOCKS）项目将面临一个巨大的挑战。这一挑战将需要构建和广泛应用远程阅读，以推动计算社会科学和数字人文科学在大量文本即数据的时代，就像望远镜和显微镜为物理和生命科学所做的那样。这种研究能力将有助于回答一些持久的问题。故事生态是如何演变的？为社会科学家和人文学者提供反映其领域语言使用的新计算工具，可以得出什么样的见解？为了回答这些问题，并使新的程序计算辅助研究，SOCKS将推进数据驱动，计算，“科学的故事。SOCKS工具将通过支持数据科学、计算社会科学、数字人文科学和复杂系统的跨学科研究来利用数据革命。 SOCKS将由佛蒙特州立大学农学院与五所主要的本科大学合作管理：尚普兰学院、米德尔伯里学院、诺维奇大学、圣米迦勒学院和佛蒙特技术学院。 SOCKS将通过对不同语料库组合中的情感和故事进行定量测量，推进基于原则性理论和方法的举措。 通过综合数据和团队，将在广泛的社会、经济和健康领域提供对故事和叙述的力量和使用的新见解。故事对于人们如何理解、解释和塑造他们的生活、他人的生活以及他们周围的世界至关重要。然而，尽管故事的力量，跨学科的学术兴趣和丰富的在线文本语料库，一个相称的和可访问的科学平台，可以支持经济和社区的故事测量，塑造区域商业战略，并告知公共政策是缺乏的。基于现有的研究基础设施，旨在通过意义，人物，事件和叙述来测量和描述特定领域内故事的形状，新工具将扩展n-gram分析到故事弧和情节的研究，并将理论驱动的分析应用于故事和人物的研究。这些数据工具的影响将描述一系列空间中的故事，包括文学，心理健康，公共卫生，气候变化，当地和区域新闻媒体，移民和社交媒体，以发现情节线，情感，数字营销的新角度以及阴谋或错误信息活动。该平台将对社交媒体和新闻进行近实时的功能;对数字化文献，档案文件和其他记录文本进行回顾;并将扩展到任何包含不同叙事组件的复杂系统。 SOCKS将培养佛蒙特州的下一代学生在复杂系统和数据科学，计算社会科学，并提供计算机和数据科学的教师培训，以确保佛蒙特州的技术产业及其相关经济的长期未来。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

"Distant reading" involves the use of computational methods to analyze literary texts. It is a concept with enormous unrealized potential. For example, no individual can read 100 million tweets or a century's worth of literature or all the New York Times articles ever written. However, by scaling up and harnessing data, a distant reading system can be created that does. The "Science of Online Corpora, Knowledge, and Stories" (SOCKS) project will undertake a grand challenge. The challenge will entail the construction and broad application of distant reading to advance the computational social sciences and digital humanities in the age of massive text-as-data online, in the same way that telescopes and microscopes have done for the physical and life sciences. This research capacity will assist in answering some enduring questions. How do ecologies of stories evolve? What insights can be derived from providing social scientists and humanities scholars with new computational instruments reflecting language use in their domain? To answer these questions and enable new programs of computationally aided research, SOCKS will advance a data-driven, computational, "science of stories." SOCKS tools will harness the data revolution by supporting transdisciplinary research in data science, computational social science, digital humanities, and complex systems. SOCKS will be administered by the University of Vermont & State Agricultural College in collaboration with five predominantly undergraduate universities: Champlain College, Middlebury College, Norwich University, Saint Michael's College, and Vermont Technical College. SOCKS will advance initiatives grounded in principled theory and methods through the quantitative measurement of sentiment and stories across a diverse portfolio of corpora. New insights into the power and use of stories and narratives will be provided across a broad array of social, economic, and health domains through integrated data and teams. Stories are fundamental to how people comprehend, explain, and potentially shape their lives, the lives of others, and the world around them. Yet despite the power of stories, academic interest across many disciplines, and abundant online text-based corpora, a commensurate and accessible scientific platform for the measurement of stories that can support economies and communities, shape regional business strategy, and inform public policy is lacking. Building on the existing research infrastructure designed to measure and describe the shapes of stories within specific domains through meaning, characters, events, and narratives, new tools will extend n-gram analysis to the study of story-arcs and plots, and to apply theory-driven analysis to the study of stories and characters. Impacts from these data instruments will describe stories in an array of spaces including literature, mental health, public health, climate change, local and regional news media, immigration, and social media to discover plot lines, sentiment, new angles for digital marketing, and conspiratorial or mis-information campaigns. The platform will function in near real-time for social media and news; retrospectively for digitized literature, archival documents, and other recorded texts; and will extend to any evolving complex system comprising distinct narrative components. SOCKS will train the next generation of students in Vermont in complex systems and data science, computational social science, and provide teacher training for computer and data science to secure the long-term future of Vermont's technology industry and its associated economy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.