Berkeley Talks

In Berkeley Talks episode 213, Timothy Tangherlini, a UC Berkeley professor in the Department of Scandinavian and director of the Folklore Graduate Program, discusses the vital role that storytelling plays in many cultures around the world, and how it can influence belief, for good and for bad. “Stories give a basis and a justification for people to take real life action,” Tangherlini said at an Alumni and Parents Weekend at Homecoming event on campus in October. “They can be retrospective justification, but they can also be motivating justification.” A computational folklorist, who’s also a professor in the School of Information and associate director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, Tangherlini works at the intersection of informal culture, storytelling and AI. He uses a combination of methods from the study of folklore and machine learning to describe storytelling networks and classify stories. “This is where we start to unravel narrative at internet scale,” he said. “One of the t