  Surprising as it may seem, applications of statistical methods to physics
were inspired by the social sciences, which in turn are linked to the
humanities. So perhaps it is not as unlikely as it might first appear for a
group of statistical physicists and humanists to come together to investigate
one of the subjects of Thomas Jefferson's poetic interests from a scientific
point of view. And that is the nature of this article: a collaborative
interdisciplinary analysis of the works of a figure Jefferson described as a
''rude bard of the North'' and ''the greatest Poet that has ever existed.'' In
2012, a subset of this team embraced an increase in interdisciplinary methods
to apply the new science of complex networks to longstanding questions in
comparative mythology. Investigations of network structures embedded in epic
narratives allowed universal properties to be identified and ancient texts to
be compared to each other. The approach inspired new challenges in mathematics,
physics and even processes in industry, thereby illustrating how collaborations
of this nature can be mutually beneficial and can capture the attention of a
public, often ill-served by academic communication and dissemination. This
article derives from these works, and from our consistent objective to help
bridge the perceived gap between the natural sciences and the humanities. First
we discuss the history of relationships between the two. Then we discuss the
origins of the poems of Ossian and Jefferson's interests. We follow with our
statistical approach in the next section. In the final section, we explore
ideas for future research on these themes and discuss the potential of
collaborative pursuits of human curiosity to overcome the two cultures
dichotomy and embrace a scientific- and humanities-literate information age.
