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

“远程阅读”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，通过扩大规模和利用数据，可以创建一个远程读取系统。“在线语料库、知识和故事科学”（SOCKS）项目将承担一个巨大的挑战。这一挑战将需要远程阅读的构建和广泛应用，以推动在线海量文本即数据时代的计算社会科学和数字人文科学，就像望远镜和显微镜为物理科学和生命科学所做的一样。这种研究能力将有助于回答一些经久不衰的问题。故事生态是如何进化的？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，可以获得哪些见解？为了回答这些问题，并使新的计算辅助研究项目成为可能，SOCKS将推进一种数据驱动的、计算的“故事科学”。SOCKS工具将通过支持数据科学、计算社会科学、数字人文和复杂系统的跨学科研究来驾驭数据革命。SOCKS项目将由佛蒙特大学和州立农业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、圣迈克尔学院和佛蒙特技术学院。SOCKS将通过对不同语料库的情感和故事进行定量测量，推进基于原则理论和方法的倡议。通过整合数据和团队，将在广泛的社会、经济和卫生领域提供关于故事和叙述的力量和使用的新见解。故事是人们理解、解释并潜在地塑造自己的生活、他人的生活和周围世界的基础。然而，尽管故事具有强大的力量，许多学科的学术兴趣，以及丰富的在线文本语料库，但缺乏一个相应的、可访问的科学平台来衡量故事，以支持经济和社区，形成区域商业战略，并为公共政策提供信息。在现有的研究基础设施的基础上，通过意义、人物、事件和叙述来衡量和描述特定领域内的故事形态，新的工具将把n-gram分析扩展到故事弧和情节的研究，并将理论驱动分析应用到故事和人物的研究中。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、地方和区域新闻媒体、移民和社交媒体，以发现情节线索、情绪、数字营销的新角度，以及阴谋或错误信息的活动。该平台将为社交媒体和新闻提供近乎实时的功能；对数字化文献、档案文件和其他记录文本进行回顾性分析；并将扩展到任何进化的复杂系统，包括不同的叙事组件。SOCKS将在复杂系统和数据科学、计算社会科学方面培训佛蒙特州的下一代学生，并为计算机和数据科学提供教师培训，以确保佛蒙特州技术产业及其相关经济的长期未来。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

"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.