There Are Just Six Plots
From Harry Potter and Romeo and Juliet to the stories of Oedipus and Icarus, almost every tale told conforms to one of just six plots, researchers have claimed.
A major new analysis of over 1,700 stories identified the core plots ‘which form the building blocks of complex narratives’.
Researchers used complex data-mining to locate words linked to positive or negative emotion in each story to reveal the set of arcs.
A major new analysis of over 1,700 stories identified the core plots ‘which form the building blocks of complex narratives’. Shown, the plot of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which researchers found has the ‘rise, fall rise‘ plot.
An emotional arc is similar to a plot building block that tells a story by generating an emotional response from the reader, reports MIT Review.
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For example, ‘man falls into hole, man gets out of hole’ or one of the most well-know, ‘boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl’.
And prior to Computational Story lab at the University of Vermont’s study most believed there was anywhere from three to more than thirty different arcs.
To conduct the study, researchers used sentiment analysis, which is the idea that words have both positive and emotional impacts, to map the emotional arcs.
Words can be measured of the emotional valence of text and how it changes from moment to moment.
The team then analyzed the emotional polarity of ‘word windows’ and slid these windows through the text to create a picture of how the emotional valence changes.
This task was performed on fictional works taken from the Project Gutenberg website that had been downloaded more than 150 times each.
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