[klue07]

Am I missing something? The result for the 6 main emotional arcs basically enumerates all the possible permutations of rise and fall of length 1, 2, and 3 which seems pretty obvious.

Length 1: rise, fall

Length 2: rise-fall, fall-rise

Length 3: rise-fall-rise, fall-rise-fall (must be interchanging because for example fall-fall-rise would probably just be considered fall-rise)

[sago]

I thought the same, and as per fovc's comment, below, I think what their statistical analysis did was basically a coarse fourier transform.

In the Harry Potter example you can see that a higher frequency is very significant. But the exact frequency is probably rather arbitrary from book to book, whether there are ten peaks or five, say. So I'd imagine, over lots of texts, any particular higher frequencies is less significant, leaving the lowest modes to dominate, as you point out.

So overall, a rather uninspiring result, I felt.

Though if we're both missing something, it would be good to know!

[hbosch]

A note some HNers might find tangentially interesting: in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Fourier transforms are a bedrock concept for the titular entertainment, which is considered such a perfect piece of media that it is lethally addictive. How nice it was to see this post about "shapes of narrative" be compared to Fourier transforms for a IJ nerd!

[Pyramus]

Very uninspiring indeed!

Let me know if you are interested in investigating this properly.

[jfoutz]

It actually sounds a lot like the old Vonnegut talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ

non video description https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/09/kurt-...

the talk is funny though, i saw him give a much longer version.

[wry_discontent]

My first thought was that Vonnegut realized this decades ago

[ggggtez]

I agree... the figures were all just permutations of rise and fall. When all you have is one measure (average word happiness) I don't really see what else you can draw. I guess the main contribution is that many stories have relatively simple rise-fall curves, and don't often change their emotional state more than 3 times.

[ehudla]

Actually, if all possible arcs are represented it is an even more interesting result, I think. Think about it, it goes against all the enumerations of story lines that have been offered.

[anotheryou]

I wonder how books with a lot of cuts between characters and stories look like.