The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes
A. J. Reagan, L. Mitchell, D. Kiley, C. M. Danforth, and P. S. Dodds
EPJ Data Science, 5, 31, 2016
Times cited: 476
Abstract:
Advances in computing power, natural language processing, and digitization of text now make it possible to study our a culture's evolution through its texts using a "big data" lens. Our ability to communicate relies in part upon a shared emotional experience, with stories often following distinct emotional trajectories, forming patterns that are meaningful to us. Here, by classifying the emotional arcs for a filtered subset of 1,737 stories from Project Gutenberg's fiction collection, we find a set of six core trajectories which form the building blocks of complex narratives. We strengthen our findings by separately applying optimization, linear decomposition, supervised learning, and unsupervised learning. For each of these six core emotional arcs, we examine the closest characteristic stories in publication today and find that particular emotional arcs enjoy greater success, as measured by downloads.
- This is the default HTML.
- You can replace it with your own.
- Include your own code without the HTML, Head, or Body tags.
BibTeX:
@Article{reagan2016c,
author = {Reagan, Andrew J. and Mitchell, Lewis and Danforth,
Christopher M. and Dodds, Peter Sheridan},
title = {The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six
basic shapes},
journal = {EPJ Data Science},
year = {2016},
key = {stories,happiness},
volume = {5},
pages = {31},
note = {Available at
\href{https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06820}{https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06820}},
}