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I'm just going to throw this out there, that until recently, we didn't necessarily have the computational tools to plot these stories algorithmically, as Vonneg
by RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
I'm just going to throw this out there, that until recently, we didn't necessarily have the computational tools to plot these stories algorithmically, as Vonnegut suggests doing. However, with modern language models, we surely do so at this moment.
Not that I have the time to take on more projects, but it must be reasonably easy to, say, do a sentiment analysis of the synopses of books and movies, say from IMBD, and generate these curves. I think it would be interesting to do a kind of type analysis on how many unique structures there really are.
- echelon 4y agoOr to take the shapes and generate stories that fit. Visual character arcs, plotlines, mood, pacing, tension, etc.
- curiousllama 4y agoA friend did this for a school project! It was super cool - Harry potter was cool because the later books took on different shapes, which to me showed one of the reasons such a simple set of stories got so popular (Book 1 is Cinderella; Book 5 is Kafka; Book 7 is "Man in a Hole", etc.). But ultimately, on real data, what it boiled down to is "there are only so many general shapes you can plot in 2D." It apparently became a very manual visualization process: the normalization problems (book length, length of good/bad bits, etc.) from different texts swamped any new shapes one could conceivably identify using the method.