Chris Danforth
Professor, Department of Mathematics & Statistics
Co-Director, Computational Story Lab
Associate Director, Vermont Complex Systems Center
Director, Vermont Advanced Computing Center
University of Vermont
Research
“Inside the lab that’s quantifying happiness”
Profile of our research group in Outside Magazine
Recent funding from NSF, AMD, and MassMutual
Research team & group publications
Lived Experiences Measured Using Rings Study (LEMURS)
"The war in Ukraine has made Russian social-media users glum" The Economist
“Is Everybody Doing … OK? Let’s Ask Social Media”
Story on Hedonometer in New York Times
“Has Twitter just had its saddest fortnight ever?”
Story on Hedonometer in Nature
"Storywrangler: A massive exploratorium for sociolinguistic, cultural, socioeconomic, and political timelines using Twitter" Paper in Science Advances
“Instagram photos reveal predictive markers of depression”
Paper in EPJ Data Science, coverage by New York Times
“The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes” Paper in EPJ Data Science, coverage by The Atlantic
“Human language reveals a universal positivity bias”
Paper in PNAS, coverage by New York Times
StoryWrangler: A visual comparison of phrase popularity in 150 billion tweets
Recent Publications
- 106. Say Their Names: Resurgence in the collective attention toward Black victims of fatal police violence following the death of George Floyd.
H. H. Wu, R. J. Gallagher, T. Alshaabi, J. L. Adams, J. R. Minot, M. V. Arnold, B. F. Welles, R. Harp, P. S. Dodds, C. M. Danforth.
PLOS ONE. 2023.
[pdf] [journal url] [arXiv] [thread]
- 105. Ousiometrics and Telegnomics: The essence of meaning conforms to a two-dimensional powerful-weak and dangerous-safe framework with diverse corpora presenting a safety bias.
P. S. Dodds, T. Alshaabi, M. I. Fudolig, J. W. Zimmerman, J. Lovato, S. Beaulieu, J. R. Minot, M. V. Arnold, A. J. Reagan, C. M. Danforth.
In Review. 2023.
[pdf] [abstract] [online appendix] [thread]
- 103. Sentiment analysis of medical record notes for lung cancer patients at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
D. Elbers, J. La, J. R Minot, R. E. Gramling, M. T. Brophy, N. V. Do, N. Fillmore, P. S. Dodds, C. M. Danforth.
PLOS ONE. 2023.
[pdf] [journal url]
- 99. Spatial changes in park visitation at the onset of the pandemic.
K. Linnell, M. Fudolig, A. Schwartz, T. H. Ricketts, J. P. M. O'Neil-Dunne, P. S. Dodds, C. M. Danforth.
PLOS Global Health. 2022.
[pdf] [journal url] [arxiv] [thread]
- 98. Allotaxonometry and rank-turbulence divergence:
A universal instrument for comparing complex systems.
P. S. Dodds, J. R. Minot, M. V. Arnold, T. Alshaabi, J. L. Adams, D. R. Dewhurst, T. J. Gray, M. R. Frank, A. J. Reagan, C. M. Danforth.
In Review. 2022.
[pdf] [arXiv] [online appendix] [code] [thread]
- 97. Fame and Ultrafame: Measuring and comparing daily levels of 'being talked about' for United States' presidents, their rivals, God, countries, and K-pop.
P. S. Dodds, J. R. Minot, M. V. Arnold, T. Alshaabi, J. L. Adams, D. R. Dewhurst, A. J. Reagan, C. M. Danforth.
Journal of Quantitative Description. 2022.
[pdf] [journal url] [arXiv] [thread] [online appendix]
- 96. Quantifying Changes in the Language Used Around Mental Health on Twitter Over 10 Years: Observational Study.
A. M. Stupinski, T. Alshaabi, M. V. Arnold, J. R. Minot, M. Price, P. S. Dodds, C. M. Danforth.
Journal of Medical Internet Research: Mental Health. 2022.
[pdf] [journal url] [arXiv] [thread]
- 95. Augmenting semantic lexicons using word embeddings and transfer learning.
T. Alshaabi, C. V. Oort, M. Fudolig, M. V. Arnold, C. M. Danforth, P. S. Dodds.
Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. 2022.
[pdf] [journal url] [arXiv] [thread]
- 94. Gauging the happiness benefit of US urban parks through Twitter.
A. J. Schwartz, P. S. Dodds, J. P. M. O’Neil-Dunne, T. H. Ricketts, C. M. Danforth.
PLOS ONE. 2022.
[pdf] [journal url] [arXiv] [online appendix] [thread] [blog] [press]
- 93. Sentiment and structure in word co-occurrence networks on Twitter.
M. I. Fudolig, T. Alshaabi, M. V. Arnold, C. M. Danforth, P. S. Dodds.
Applied Network Science. 2022.
[pdf] [journal url] [arXiv] [thread]
- 90. Interpretable bias mitigation for textual data: Reducing gender bias in patient notes while maintaining classification performance.
J. R. Minot, N. Cheney, M. Maier, D. C. Elbers, C. M. Danforth, P. S. Dodds.
ACM Transactions on Computing for Health Care. 2022.
[pdf] [journal url] [arXiv] [thread]
- 89. Ecological and Coevolutionary Dynamics in Modern Markets Yield Nonstationarity in Market Efficiencies.
C. M. Van Oort, J. H Ring, D. R. Dewhurst, C. M. Danforth, B. F. Tivnan.
Complexity. 2022.
[pdf] [journal url]
- 88. Doomscrolling during COVID-19: The negative association between daily social and traditional media consumption and mental health symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic.
M. Price, A. C. Legrand, Z. M. F. Brier, K. van Stolk-Cooke, K. Peck, P. S. Dodds, Z. W. Adams, C. M. Danforth.
Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. 2022.
[pdf] [journal url] [arXiv]
- 87. Storywrangler: A massive exploratorium for
sociolinguistic, cultural, socioeconomic, and political timelines using Twitter.
T. Alshaabi, J. L. Adams, M. V. Arnold, J. R. Minot, D. R. Dewhurst, A. J. Reagan, C. M. Danforth, P. S. Dodds.
Science Advances. 2021.
[pdf] [journal url] [arXiv] [appendix] [online visualization] [thread] [press]
- 86. Probability-turbulence divergence: A tunable allotaxonometric instrument for comparing heavy-tailed categorical distributions.
P. S. Dodds, J. R. Minot, M. V. Arnold, T. Alshaabi, J. L. Adams, D. R. Dewhurst, A. J. Reagan, C. M. Danforth.
arXiv. 2021.
[pdf] [arXiv] [online appendix] [thread]
- 84. Generalized Word Shift Graphs: A Method for Visualizing and Explaining Pairwise Comparisons Between Texts.
R. J. Gallagher, M. R. Frank, L. Mitchell, A. J. Schwartz, A. J. Reagan, C. M. Danforth, P. S. Dodds.
EPJ Data Science. 2021.
[pdf] [journal url] [arXiv] [code] [thread]
- 83. Computational timeline reconstruction of the stories surrounding Trump: Story turbulence, narrative control, and collective chronopathy.
P. S. Dodds, J. R. Minot, M. V. Arnold, T. Alshaabi, J. L. Adams, A. J. Reagan, C. M. Danforth.
PLOS ONE. 2021.
[pdf] [journal url] [arXiv] [online appendix] [thread] [press]
- 82. Long-term word frequency dynamics derived from Twitter are corrupted: A bespoke approach to detecting and removing pathologies in ensembles of time series.
P. S. Dodds, J. R. Minot, M. V. Arnold, T. Alshaabi, J. L. Adams, D. R. Dewhurst, A. J. Reagan, C. M. Danforth.
arXiv. 2021.
[pdf] [arXiv] [thread]
Teaching
Applied Mathematics classes taught at UVM include Linear Algebra, Numerical Analysis, Nonlinear Dynamics, Ordinary Differential Equations, and Data Ethics
We now offer an undergraduate degree in Data Science, as well as both MS and PhD degrees in Complex Systems & Data Science
Tweets
Statistics in slow motion pic.twitter.com/Y4zZoFiwuy
— Chris Danforth (@ChrisDanforth) February 23, 2018
Meanwhile, weather prediction, our society's best algorithmic decision support tool, and one of the great success stories of science, continues to improve.https://t.co/sDRtAOzBVv pic.twitter.com/wPK0IZwCZR
— Chris Danforth (@ChrisDanforth) January 24, 2019
Did Trump's speech on January 6 incite violence? Yes.
— Chris Danforth (@ChrisDanforth) February 12, 2021
Data journalism piece led by @aleszubajak w/analysis of Parler from @uvmcomplexity Director @peterdodds & Data Artist @artistjaneadams contributes evidence for conviction:https://t.co/VEoO80EYjz
Your morning dose of glowing deterministic nonperiodic flow!
— Chris Danforth (@ChrisDanforth) May 30, 2019
Chaotic project with my 5th grade son. pic.twitter.com/s1QwBSDJkC
Hahahahaha, Duuuuude, Yessssssssss!
— Chris Danforth (@ChrisDanforth) July 10, 2019
How do words get stretched for dramatic effect? In many very interesting ways! Details:https://t.co/ZkBLiPW2wR pic.twitter.com/3fqbPLjQvb
Yesterday was the saddest day in the history of @Twitter pic.twitter.com/91VP3Ywtnr
— hedonometer (@hedonometer) May 30, 2020