WEBVTT

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It's a different way of doing social
science.

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It's an ambitious way of doing social
science that we hadn't really looked at

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before.

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We've been working to develop tools to
try and quantify a science of stories.

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Now we're at a point where all of a
sudden this world is just like cracked

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open.

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Science that just wasn't possible a few
years ago is now possible if the

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technology we're able to deploy.

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SOCKS grew out of a decade of work at the
Vermont Complex Systems Institute,

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where we've been building instruments
that measure social indicators,

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health indicators and cultural change.

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SOCKS as a project is was the study of
online corporate knowledge and stories.

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But it's really a a, you know,
a big data tool to understand human text

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and the ways that text reveals there's
things about human beings.

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Stories are something that we are all,
as humans, naturally drawn to.

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However we relate to the world and with
people around us are all conditioned by

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what we think is important and our sense
of identity and how we identify with

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other people.

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Whether it's Wikipedia or Twitter or
Reddit or all these kind of spaces where

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people talk,
we can see things that are happening in

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all those conversations that we couldn't
see if we're just looking one page at a

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time or one tweet at a time.

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One thing that social media has done
among many for us is to give us a chance

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to know what average people are thinking
about.

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Part of our job in the SOCKS project is not
simply to look at these patterns,

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but to contextualize them.

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When it comes to human interaction and,
and stories and how we tell them,

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it is complex.

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There's there's heterogeneity,
there's different ways in which we will

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express ourselves,
different ways we'll hear it from one

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another.

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The most important problems we're facing
as a society require expertise from all

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sorts of disciplines,
including psychology, economics,

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philosophy, mathematics, computer science.

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So when you bring a group of people
together from different backgrounds who

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are interested in different things,
the chances are much better you'll get

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creative solutions to some of these
really important social problems.

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So it's the kind of interdisciplinary
work where you bring different skills to

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the table.

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And when you fuse those two things
together,

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you're creating branches of research that
haven't been utilized very often.

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You end up with a very creative and
multifaceted viewpoint on on these

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questions.

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It really is this ecosystem that's way
more than just research.

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We are doing so much education and
outreach and workforce development.

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Part of the intent of the App Score
programs and the SOCKS programs is this

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kind of workforce development more
broadly.

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One element of that is training,
and that's training of undergraduate

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students, of graduate students, postdocs.

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I think Vermont State University's role
in all of this is to make sure some of

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this wonderful work that UVM is doing
benefits the state and benefits young

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people and benefits the workforce.

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So we have opportunities for
undergraduate students from all over the

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US to come and spend the summer here with
us and work on some of the exciting

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research problems we're tackling in
computational social science.

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They work with faculty and other staff
and learn that this data science and all

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of that can also not just apply to
science,

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it can apply to any other topic that
you're interested in.

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Another really kind of central part of
the workforce development is the broader

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kind of research capacity that we build
with partner institutions.

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The SOCKS Teachers Academy is actually a
graduate certificate in computer science

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education,
and the whole focus is to get teachers up

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to speed in computer science in order for
them to teach at the middle school and

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the high school level.

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We could potentially impact about 20,
000 students in the state of Vermont.

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It is a way of training new social
scientists.

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It is a new set of tools.

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It is a new set of questions.

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And so it's all of those things all at
once.

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And I think that's probably what's
interesting about SOCKS,

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is you're finding a lot of different
things happening all at once and you're

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finding different ways of getting new
insights and information out of that to

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kind of propel science forward in the
future.

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With the ideas that we're working on
right now,

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the things that we're trying to study in
the world,

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those aren't it like those aren't the
limits.

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So we've intentionally kind of created a
lot of infrastructure that's going to

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live with it beyond the grant.

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And I think collaborations are one of
those like really valuable infrastructure.

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Those will go on and people like working
together.

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They learn from each other.

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They're going to keep working together
beyond just sort of the the funding.

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I think there's more to this that we're
going to discover.

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We care about the human condition,
about the human experience,

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and we study it with a level of
scientific integrity and scalability.

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I think we can do big things here.