Analysis of the emotional change of the story line of the novel reveals the classic equation

ByRach

A story drawn in a movie or a novel must consider the whole composition so that the reader's attention can be drawn by properly drawing the inner face and values ​​of the character, that is, the reader can emotionally transfer to the talk or character If it can not be done the reader will not feel interesting. Changing the emotion of a character through one piece of work is called "emotional arc", and when analyzing many novels by data mining, there is an emotional arc which can be said as a standard flow of a certain flow in novel understood.

The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes
http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07772

Data Mining Novels Reveals the Six Basic Emotional Arcs of Storytelling
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601848/data-mining-novels-reveals-the-six-basic-emotional-arcs-of-storytelling/

Here's how your favorite classic novel made a computer feel | The Verge
http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/6/12107688/classic-story-emotional-arcs-big-data-study

The data mining analysis of the emotional arc showing emotional change of the novel is a research team led by Professor Andrew Regan of the University of Vermont Statistics. The research team assumes that words contained in sentences express negative emotions and positive emotions, and that these words can be used to measure the emotional value of a sentence. In addition, I thought that we can measure how emotional value changes throughout the whole work.

The research team digitizes and publishes copyright-free works after a certain period of time since the author's death "Project · GutenbergWe analyzed the texts of 1,700 fiction works downloadable with "Measure the change in emotional value throughout the work.

As a result of analysis by the research team, "emotional value rises slowly from the beginning to the end", "slowly falling from the beginning to the end", "going up first, then descending" "rising after first dropping down" "on the way up first "It is found that there are six standard patterns of" go down first and go up and down on the way and then descend ". The rise in emotional value is "pleasant", and the descent means "unpleasant".

A representative example of a work "the emotional value slowly rises from the beginning to the end" is the prototype of "Alice 's in Wonderland"Alice in the underground countryOn the contrary, a representative example of a work "emotional value slowly falls from the beginning to the end" is William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet"was. Also, the most popular thing is that it was an emotional arc that mixes "descending → rising" and "rising → descending → rising".

The research team collected the data of the novel analyzedHedonometerIf you search on the title of the novel you are interested in and the author's name, you can see a graph that quantifies the change in emotional value. For example, the following is a graph of "Alice in the underground country" on the above, you can see that the emotional value rises slowly from the beginning of the story, the rapid rise is recorded in the middle, and it goes to the end without dropping the emotional value.


This is J. K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone"The graph showing the change in emotional value throughout the entire work of" Unlike the Alice in the underground country, the emotional value increases and decreases throughout the work. On the graph, the last one has a low emotional value. However, in fact, Griffin doll to whom Harry belongs has been wrapped in a happy mood in the dormitory opposition cup, so it may be a place where the emotional value can not be accurately quantified from sentences yet Hmm.