Hello and welcome to the Storygrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer.

I'm your host Tim Graal and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works.

Sean Coyne is joining me soon. He is the creator of Story Grid, the author of the book Story Grid,

and he is an editor with over 25

years experience. Now, a few weeks ago, Sean mentioned this Hidonometer, this research into

stories and how it's being applied to stories and how we see the same six story arcs over

and over. And so we were talking about this some more and decided to

invite one of the researchers on the show. So this episode is a bit of a departure from us, but it

becomes really interesting as we talk about not only what this research shows, but the future

implications of it. So I think you're really going to enjoy it. It was a lot of fun to talk to this

researcher and dive into the work that they're doing. So let's jump in and get started.

So in this episode, we're diving deep into the research that we mentioned last week, that Sean

mentioned last week with the hedonometer. And we have on now with this, Andy Reagan, who is a part of

this. So Andy, I just want you to tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do and,

you know, specifically the work you're doing with this hedonometer research. Yeah. Great. So, yeah,

my name's Andy. As Tim said, I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Vermont up here in Burlington, Vermont, and I work with the computational story lab research group. So, you know, stories have been in our framing for a while. The leaders of the group are Chris Stanforth and Peter Dodds, professors here at UVM. And we're affiliated with the Complex Systems Center here. So, you know, complex systems are, you know,

studying all sorts of behaviors and data systems that are out in the real world. So we,

in particular, have studied the hedonometer. So we've developed this tool, which allows us to measure

happiness. And we've applied it to a lot of different areas so if you go to our website for example

hit down to mender.org you'll see the first thing you'll see is a time series of Twitter and you know

there's a lot of interesting patterns that you can pick up from there most recently we've gone and

looked at stories which i think you guys heard about last week and yeah we're going to dive more into that

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