演讲内容：
Once known by slightly more industrial terms like data-mining or text-mining, big data has enjoyed a great deal of attention in the Euro-American sphere over the past decade or so. As computational methods for understanding texts have made it possible to explore more, and bigger, texts, we have, we think, begun to think less in terms of authors and periods and more in terms of historical and geographical patterns, trends, and clusters. At the same time, there has been a consistent strain in computer science and other disciplines to try to find ways to understand that which seems to elude the graph: narrative. In this talk I would like to sketch out a few of the more recent computationally-intensive approaches as well as to discuss some early experiments of my own.
My own early explorations have focused on local treasure legends. The appeal of the legend as a narrative form is its very looseness and how flexible its form is. That is, if any narrative form would seem to offer up a way to de-couple ideas from their sequence in a narrative progression, legends would seem more accessible to such an approach. The goal of this work is to examine the relationship between the network topologies of ideas and the narrative grammars of plot points.
演讲人简介：
John Laudun, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
Research Fellow, The Center for Cultural and Eco-Tourism
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Ph.D., Indiana University, 1999
P.O. Box 44691
Lafayette LA 70504
Griffin 356
Phone: 337-482-5493
E-mail: laudun at louisiana dot edu
Teaching and Research Areas:
Folklore and folklife studies; creativity studies; documentary studies (texts, photography, audio, video).
John Laudun has published regionally, nationally, and internationally on a variety of topics having to do with folklore and its uses both in present as well as in understanding the past. He has examined the role of history-telling and talk in a Midwestern community, the uses of African American folklore both in lived experience as well as in literary texts, the use of space by urban Appalachians, what it means to use folklife materials in elementary and secondary classrooms as well as the uses, and abuses, of Louisiana foodways. His scholarly work has appeared in journals (including African American Review, Journal of American Folklore, and Louisiana Folklore Miscellany) as well as anthologies. He has served as a consultant on a number of public and private projects, was awarded a grants by both private and public foundations (including the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and the Louisiana Board of Regents). He has produced CDs and directed a television series on folklife. His book on creativity was chosen to be part of the Mellon Foundation's Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World series and will be published next year by the University Press of Mississippi. He has maintained a weblog -- http://johnlaudun.org/ -- since 2003, before it was cool, and continues to publish texts, images, audio, and video there.
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