Title: Mapping the Terrain of Online Storytelling: Perceptions, Datasets, and Communities

Abstract: People use storytelling to persuade, to entertain, to inform, and to make sense of their experiences as a community. But where does storytelling most often take place online? When are people more likely to rely on storytelling as a rhetorical strategy? And how do different people recognize stories as stories? I'll present work on developing a dataset of diverse social media stories that enables new computational analyses of storytelling both across online communities and within specific social contexts. I'll also share evidence of the diversity of story perceptions across audiences, quantifying differences in reasoning about what differentiates storytelling from other kinds of online communication.

Bio: Maria Antoniak is a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for AI on the Semantic Scholar team. Her research is in natural language processing and cultural analytics, and her interests include using computational methods to study stories, values, and healthcare, often in the setting of online communities, and in measuring the reliability of NLP tools when used for curated datasets and human research questions. She earned her PhD in Information Science from Cornell University, has a master’s degree in Computational Linguistics from the University of Washington, and has been recognized as a “Rising Star” in both computer science and data science.