ACUMEN: Analyzing Cultural Motif Effects in Networks

A motif is a non-commonplace, specific narrative element (such as a striking event, character, or object) that is repeated across stories found within the same cultural group, and concisely expresses complex cultural and political ideas through the inferences it evokes about a particular situation. If we can track motifs in communications, we will have a significant advantage in modeling information flow in networks. We will build on the analogical reasoning and deep semantic parsing abilities of STRIDER that we developed in Phase 1 to facilitate the extraction of motifs, detect their use in texts, and predict their evolution over time. We will integrate the new work on narrative identification and motif detection by FIU into STRIDER's approach, and we will apply the new system both in the case where the motif is hand-coded and must be detected within the "clutter" of actual texts, and for the problem of extracting likely new motifs.