I’ve been thinking a bit about my next acid logic piece which will tie in with a presentation author Kurt Vonnegut once gave on the shapes of stories. He argued that there are limited set of flows that stories can take and that all stories ever written ultimately fit into this set. I might as well let him explain as the presentation is online.

Today I come across an article about an attempt at making computers perform data mining to analyze the arcs of stories stories. Basically a computer “read” numerous stories and ranked the emotional affect of the words to map out the emotional flow of the story. As the article explains…

Their method is straightforward. The idea behind sentiment analysis is that words have a positive or negative emotional impact. So words can be a measure of the emotional valence of the text and how it changes from moment to moment. So measuring the shape of the story arc is simply a question of assessing the emotional polarity of a story at each instant and how it changes.

It was then concluded that there are six basic story arcs or flows, though some novels combine several different arcs into a larger tale.

I’d be curious to see analysis of the flow of other arts forms—music, painting, cinema etc.