Data Mining Novels Reveals the Six Basic Emotional Arcs of Storytelling (Technology Review)

Later in the post: "In particular, the team says the most popular are stories involving two sequential man-in-hole arcs and a Cinderella arc followed by a tragedy."

"Reagan and co do this by analyzing the emotional polarity of “word windows” and sliding these windows through the text to build up a picture of how the emotional valence changes. They performed this task on over 1,700 English works of fiction that had each been downloaded from the Project Gutenberg website more than 150 times.

Finally, they used a variety of data-mining techniques to tease apart the different emotional arcs present in these stories.

The results make for interesting reading. Reagan and co say that their data mining techniques all point to the existence of six basic emotional arcs that form the building blocks of more complex stories. They are also able to identify the stories that are the best examples of each arc."

Data Mining Novels Reveals the Six Basic Emotional Arcs of Storytelling