Assistant Professor at Department of Communication & Journalism at Texas A&M university.
Researcher, social scientist, data scientist
Xuanjun (Jason) Gong
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Stories that
This project started with a puzzling question a few years ago: Why was the last season of Game of Thrones so bad? Our research offers a potential answer to this question: the loss of character focalization and breakdown of modular structure hinder audiences' engagement with the stories.
Our project practices open science practices that the dataset and analytical codes are all available:
github.com/jasongong11/...
I want to thank my excellent collaborators; this project is impossible without their tremendous and constructive inputs and guidance.
@aeden.bsky.social @fhopp.bsky.social @annawolfe.bsky.social @mattgrizz.bsky.social
2/11 We start with college students; a group that over-indexes on mental health challenges.
In the U.S., 37% report moderate-to-severe depression, 33% anxiety, and 58% loneliness.
They’re also heavy media users.
Across two datasets, including more than 10,000 novels and 1,000 movie screenplays, we found that stories with a narrative network that has a lower average shortest path length, lower clustering, and higher modularity tend to be more successful (higher popularity and ratings).
Enjoying Stranger Things during the holiday season? Have you thought about why some stories are more successful than others? Our new preprint investigates this question by studying the character networks in the narratives:
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Stories with an efficient structure and better at managing complexity in their organization of characters, events, and plots (closely connected characters, modular communities, and focalization on characters) tend to facilitate comprehension and engagement with the story, therefore.
Our work supports the Graph Learning Theory, suggesting that people process and memorize the external environment (language, social actors, events) regulated by principles of graph theory.
Depressed? Anxious? Lonely?
What if mental health doesn’t just result from media use, but shapes how we choose media?
In a new preprint, Valerie Klein, @gongxuanjun.bsky.social @aeden.bsky.social and I and I test this using a computational decision-making model: doi.org/10.21203/rs....
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