11–20 of 105 posts
> 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…
> 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.
Because they analyzed "thousands of novels." There are no Pirahã novels. The point I was trying to make is that the sample set of 1700 novels, most likely from a Western tradition, is laughably small to claim it applies to "every story in the world."
What about fall to fall tales and rise to rise tales that abound plenty-full in several cultures like mine.
Moreover, the receiver's personal ties to the story and its elements (characters, settings and then the meta:translation, origin, etc.) before, during and after getting story matters as much, if not more.
I wonder if I can construct a Cantor-like diagonal proof that creates a definitively non-countable plot.
If you tracked multiple hero/protagonists then their interleavings could be uncountable.
This counts as research?
First, I'm not even sure every good story can be shoehorned in the framework.
For example, how does the archetypal "vengeance story" fit in that framework?
In that type of story, many a time, the seeker of vengeance, once he's reached his goal after much struggling, finds he's destroyed himself in so doing.
Trying to apply the framework leads to the main character essentially never getting out of the hole ... you could argue that reaching the vengeance goal is a super short "high" of the story, but I find the argument specious.
Second, even if we assume that every story can somehow be shoehorned into a simple curve of highs and lows ... what does that actually teach you about the story?
More importantly, what kind of creative help does that buy you? I'm pretty sure I coud "reverse-engineer" any highs-an-lows type curve into a story rather easily ... will that make the story any kind of interesting? I doubt it.
However, the video linked to in the article appears to end before the most interesting part.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-84vuR1f90
Hamlet. It's never clear whether what's happening belongs more toward the good or bad side of the vertical axis.
The curve you get is a flat horizontal line. That's art. Never clearly good or bad but profound ambiguity.
Also, for those interested in the systematic (graphical) formulation of stories, check out StoryGrid:
This feels pretty reductive. They chose one variable to measure stories on, fortune, and then of course all of these stories follow a short list of possible patterns. This counts as research?