Vanessa Pope, postdoc on the COSMOS project, has published research from her PhD at QMUL in PNAS Nexus: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/5/1/pgaf394/8431144.
Vanessa C Pope, Rebecca Stewart, Elaine Chew, Timing structures in live comedy: A matched-sequence approach to mapping performance dynamics, PNAS Nexus, Volume 5, Issue 1, January 2026, pgaf394, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf394
The article presents a framework, called Topology Analysis of Matching Sequences (TAMS), that algorithmically detects repeated material across performances and maps its timing to visualize performance dynamics.
While Vanessa’s research on comedy didn’t explore listeners’ physiological response, she did apply data science to study time structures, including analysing laughter!
The full press release is available on EurekAlert!
Mapping comedic timing, ta-da! – https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1112561.
