The original paper [1] also contains some great graphs. And less hyperbole; these are the six basic plots of ~1400 English-language stories on Project Gutenberg, not of every story in the world, ever
Skimming the paper: it looks like they are performing sentiment analysis on books, effectively taking the Fourier transform of the sentiment-versus-time data, and reporting which Fourier component (up to 3rd harmonic) is strongest.
A self-organizing map (SOM) or self-organizing feature map (SOFM) is an unsupervised machine learning technique used to produce a low-dimensional (typically two-dimensional) representation of a higher dimensional data set while preserving the topological structure of the data.
More great "diagrams" from mathematician Jean Petitot applying René Thom's morphodynamic models to the study of the canonical formula of myths (Lévy-Strauss).
The reporting on this study is conflating sentiment with plot structure, which misrepresents the study.
See for example, Frankenstein. The sentiment rises slightly during the Creature’s narration to Victor of his circumstances - likely the narration of the French family he was “living”/stowing away with - but that’s certainly not a “rise” in the sense Oedipus rises to noble status. It’s hard to interpret Frankenstein as anything other than the protagonist’s consistent and tragic downfall (riches to rags in this analysis).
Not sure if that’s fundamentally a problem trying to extrapolate plot beats from sentiment alone, or a bit of less than accurate journalism.
If you condense every text passage into a one-dimensional sentiment score, then all texts are going to look like graphs of rising and falling sentiments to you. Nothing unexpected there.
I actually liked the charts, but I didn't see much evidence that there's anything universal at play here that isn't just an artifact of this methodology.
I think my preference is Northrop Frye’s analysis in “Anatomy of Criticism”, his categories of “mythic”, “romantic”, “high mimetic”, “low mimetic”, “ironic” are particularly useful for analyzing the history of literature from mythic legends and epic poetry up to modern literature and fantasy.
Although this analysis isn’t so much for general plot structure as much as for looking at characters and particularly the main protagonist and their relationship to other characters and the environment of the novel.
Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces[0] posits the protagonist's journey from "the ordinary world", through numerous adventures and challenges, to eventual redemption or victory, as a universal story template.
If this article interested you then I'd highly recommend checking out TVTropes (https://tvtropes.org/) (trope roughly means any convention of fiction), if you've not already!
Vladimir Propp already analysed the basic structural elements of Russian folk tales, down to 31 elements, and drafter how these units formed classic Russian tales.
I always felt like we could mathematically define stories but I wasn’t sure how until I learned about Chaos Theory. There are some stories that seem to be very simple geometric, discrete shapes, but I think if you look at any story you’ll find a level of noise and chaos in there somewhere. The more a story approaches real life, the more chaotic it gets. I think Cassavetes is a great example of this.
Recently I’ve been thinking about narrative in terms of lossy compression, which can then be connected to our everyday perception, which uses compression to understand reality since we can’t ingest all the information we receive. Narratives differ in how much detail they delete, which then makes each narrative a compression algorithm. Movies with more detail like Cassavetes or the Italian Neorealists are usually considered “artsy” while movies with very little detail are considered “trashy.” This realization helped me talk about movies without prejudice.
Readit News
1: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.07772.pdf
https://thestory.au/articles/kurt-vonnegut-story-shapes/
You get the same patterns in music: https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/67945245/000016_2_.pdf
Also thumbs up for using self-organising maps. Way underappreciated idea!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organizing_map
about 2/3rd in: https://www.persee.fr/docAsPDF/hom_0439-4216_1988_num_28_106...
See for example, Frankenstein. The sentiment rises slightly during the Creature’s narration to Victor of his circumstances - likely the narration of the French family he was “living”/stowing away with - but that’s certainly not a “rise” in the sense Oedipus rises to noble status. It’s hard to interpret Frankenstein as anything other than the protagonist’s consistent and tragic downfall (riches to rags in this analysis).
Not sure if that’s fundamentally a problem trying to extrapolate plot beats from sentiment alone, or a bit of less than accurate journalism.
I actually liked the charts, but I didn't see much evidence that there's anything universal at play here that isn't just an artifact of this methodology.
- Booker's Seven Basic Plots
- Friedman's Story Plots
- Georges Polti's 36 Dramatic Situations
- Reich's American Narratives Tobias' 20 Plots
- Parker's Story Types
- Classic Story Conflicts
- Classic Story Types
See: https://changingminds.org/disciplines/storytelling/plots/plo...
Although this analysis isn’t so much for general plot structure as much as for looking at characters and particularly the main protagonist and their relationship to other characters and the environment of the novel.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp There's been further efforts to analyse his work https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12559-015-9338-8
I did this as an exercise almost 10 years ago now (wow!), resulting in my own novel[1], which you could describe as somewhat Dan Brown-like.
[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HdlD_tmmm1D0zX1JgXzF...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QPBYGFI