Stories don’t just describe the world, they actively shape it. From the myths that define national identity to the fragments of news and social media that shape public opinion, collective narratives organize how societies make sense of change. Yet in an era of algorithmic feeds and large-scale information flow, these narratives form and evolve faster and more diversely than we can comprehend them. This talk explores new methods for detecting and modeling collective storytelling across massive, multimodal datasets. Drawing on advances in large language models and classical narratology, I introduce a framework for tracing the actors, events, and values that coalesce into shared social stories: how they rise, transform, and stick around. By bringing narrative theory into conversation with computational modeling, "The Stories We Live By" offers a vision for how the humanities and AI together can illuminate the architectures of meaning that govern collective life.

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