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Researchers analysed 1700 novels to reveal six story types

bbc.com

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Re: Researchers analysed 1700 novels to reveal six story types

#3

Post by sdrothrock »

> Thanks to new text-mining techniques, this has now been done. Professor Matthew Jockers at Washington State University, and later researchers at the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab, analysed data from thousands of novels to reveal six basic story types

It seems a bit naive to say "every story in the world" when they analyzed only "thousands of novels" -- this doesn't even mention what languages they analyzed. I could imagine many Greek-influenced cultures (e.g. "the West") having similar archetypes by virtue of a common ancestor. Language analysis tools for CJK aren't, as far as I know, as advanced, so I can imagine a lot of stories from those languages being left out as well.

The reason I bring this up is that I'm reading a book called "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes," [1] which is about a remote tribe of people in the Amazon jungle called the Pirahã. [2]

One of the most stunning points in the book is that their culture is such that all stories told by native Pirahã are based on first-person experience. When a Pirahã dies, their stories are not passed on or retold. Due to this, there's also no need to record past stories, orally or otherwise.

This kind of study would obviously exclude stories from that kind of culture and seems a bit narrow-minded: "everything I looked at says A, so EVERYTHING must be A."

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307386120

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3

Re: Researchers analysed 1700 novels to reveal six story types

#6

Post by robotresearcher »

sdrothrock wrote: post #3

> Thanks to new text-mining techniques, this has now been done. Professor Matthew Jockers at Washington State University, and later researchers at the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab, analysed data from thousands of novels to reveal six basic story types It seems a bit naive to say "every story in the world" when they analyzed only "thousands of novels" -- this doesn't even mention what languages they…

Why would it exclude Pirahã stories?

"I got up this morning and everything was fine. Mid-morning I fell out of a tree and had a hell of a time getting home. But I made it and was so happy to see my family again."

The rise/fall model is rather trivial, but your point doesn't stick.

Re: Researchers analysed 1700 novels to reveal six story types

#7

Post by stephengillie »

gaius wrote: post #5

Thanks to new text-mining techniques, this has now been done Thanks text mining techniques! Here's an article saying the same thing almost word-for-word from 2004 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3632074/Everything...

Everything new is old already.

Re: Researchers analysed 1700 novels to reveal six story types

#9

Post by vichu »

A great book on this subject is Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. His theory of the archetypal hero and the theory of the monomyth is a great influence on anlyses like this one (and also on some artistic works - including a small film series known as Star Wars). It's fantastic to see these natural language processing techniques applied to this topic.
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