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‘They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats!’ AI Approaches to Folklore and Political Storytelling

  • 21/01/2025
  • 19:00-20:30
  • online talk

Timothy R. Tangherlini

‘They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats!’ AI Approaches to Folklore and Political Storytelling

A Folklore Society online talk

by Timothy R. Tangherlini

Tuesday 21 January 2025, 19:00 GMT

At a US presidential debate, Donald Trump trotted out a well-known rumor about refugees eating the pets of people living in the communities where they had been settled. In this paper, I explore earlier variants of this tale, and show how this rumor fits into the narrative frameworks of threat and conspiracy theory that animated the 2020 election cycle.

Rumor and the closely allied conspiracy theory play an outsize role in contemporary political discourse. Starting with the 2024 Trump/Harris debate, I trace how specific threat narratives emerge in this discursive arena, and explore some earlier manifestations of ‘they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people who live here’ story that Trump/Vance have used in the context of xenophobic communication. Turning to computational methods, I show how AI can be used to help identify emerging narrative complexes. By estimating the underlying narrative frameworks of any discursive arena, we can quickly identify the emergence of ‘threat narratives’, where insiders and outsiders are pitted against one another. The decision-making that follows from such narrative engagements can have dire downstream consequences.

Professor Timothy R. Tangherlini is a folklorist at the University of California, Berkeley where he holds the Elizabeth H. and Eugene A. Shurtleff Chair in Undergraduate Education. A specialist in Nordic folklore, as well as a researcher on legend and conspiracy theory, his current work focuses on using computational methods to understand the dynamics of storytelling at very large scale.

Tickets £6.00 (£4.00 for Folklore Society members with the Promo Code)

Every ticket sold helps to support the work of The Folklore Society.

Image: photo Timothy R. Tangherlini