Event #2: Suspense

For my second event, I attended the Culture Analytics at IPAM. The program I chose to go to was the Suspense lecture, by Mark Algee-Hewitt. He is a professor at Stanford University. His research focuses on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England and Germany and seeks to combine literary criticism with digital and quantitative analyses of literary texts. He is particularly interested in the history of aesthetic theory and the development and transmission of aesthetic and philosophic concepts during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. 

The lecture was about how suspense is measured. He begins with a scenario of a bomb being under the table. He says suspense is when we question whether or not the bomb will go on and who it will kill. This lecture helped me understand how our brains are functioned, particularly during suspense and fear. Through Mark Algee-Hewitt's lecture, I have learned that even though we know that an event is going to happen, we still arrive at the suspense. This made me question why the human brain does this and how interesting it is to see how our brains react like this. This is a great example of how we are not able to understand the brain because it is constantly growing.

Another interesting topic that stood out to me was the Neural Net: Schematic Diagram. This was a machine that inputted all topic model fields, MDW field and age of acquisition scores-all scored in .5% slices in each text. This machine was extremely useful in determining the percentage of suspense in a book. 81% of the time, given a passage at a neural net, would find the passage suspenseful. 

Mark's main question was: Is suspenseful generated at both the episodic level and narrative level? The first one focused on suspense and non-suspense over time. To do this, he added up the suspense scores, and rated on a scale of 1-8 (1 being not suspenseful and 8 being very suspenseful). He concluded that there is a linear relationship to the age of the text and how suspenseful they thought it was. He had found out that 1900's novels were more suspenseful than 1800's novels. Then, the next hypothesis focused on episodic suspense. Through this hypothesis, he explains how there is a distinct difference between suspense and surprise. He brings up the bomb scenario he brought up in the beginning of the lecture and explains how nothing is happening and then all of a sudden, a bomb explodes. This is seen as an episodic suspense 

Through this lecture, I was able to correlate it with the lecture on neuroscience+art. Suspense is created in our own minds, and suspense is different to all of us. For instance, some might find a video of a clown scary, but others who are not scared of it would not find it scary. This helped me further my knowledge of our human brain and how it functions differently. 

Through this lecture, I was able to further my understanding how suspense is measured. I also had a better understanding of the idea of Two Cultures. For instance, Mark was an English professor at Stanford, but in order to come up with these data's, he conducted an experiment. He is both an English professor and a scientist. Technology also played an important role. Without the neural net, it would have made Mark's experiment harder to conduct. Thanks to the neural net, he was able to measure the suspense levels faster and more accurate. Overall, it was an interesting lecture and I was able to learn a lot about suspense. Mark Algee-Hewitt was a wonderful speaker and I know that this won't be the last time I will be attending one of his lectures!