Modeling the Tesla narrative

In early 2017, Robert Shiller introduced the concept of narrative economics, based on several decades of research by Shiller and a number of other researchers across different fields. Narrative economics studies the impact of popular narratives and stories on economic fluctuations in the context of human interests and emotions. As narrative economics deals with popular narrative and stories, the mechanization of narrative economics is heavily dependent on the emerging field of natural language understanding.

Presentations at the 2018 Strata Data Conferences in London and New York introduced narrative modeling as a key enabler for mechanization of narrative economics. As defined, narrative modeling consists of topic extraction, emotions analysis, and call-to-action modeling of relevant documents. These presentations also shared a framework that described stickiness and viral spread of the narratives in terms of topics, emotional content, and actions and demonstrated the technical application of topic extraction and emotion analytics to understand narratives.

Today, Rashed Iqbal shares a case study in the application of narrative modeling to news and social media content about Tesla since its inception. Despite fierce challenges, Tesla has upended not only the automotive and technology sectors but also our perception of disruption itself. Tesla and its enigmatic CEO, Elon Musk, have consistently used narratives to support their brand and market valuation. Tesla has also been a social sensation, especially with Musk’s consistent sparks and firestorms in the news, ranging from his crusade against short sellers to talk of taking the company private.

Join in to learn how narrative modeling is relevant in the analysis of text and other content about contemporary topics of public interest. You’ll also get a glimpse at ongoing research in narrative analytics and see how it can be applied to gain understanding of social phenomena with reference to spread of narratives.