Good stories are so absorbing that you don’t care how they pull you in. Computers are not so easily distracted, though, and a growing number of researchers are using programs to search for hidden patterns that underlie narratives from “The Odyssey’’ to modern sitcoms. This includes new work released in June from the University of Vermont that concludes fictional stories follow one of six basic emotional trajectories. It’s a finding so reductive that it has reignited a debate about just how perceptive computers can be when it comes to analyzing plot.
The idea that all stories follow one of a few basic forms has a long history. It was formalized in the 20th century by writer Joseph Campbell, who identified the hero’s journey as an archetypical plot, and also preoccupied novelist Kurt Vonnegut. In his rejected master’s thesis at the University of Chicago, Vonnegut claimed that stories are defined by the swings of their main characters between good and ill fortune.
He argued that there are three main trajectories most stories follow: “man in a hole’’ (character starts out doing fine, gets in trouble, gets out of trouble), “boy meets girl’’ (starts out normal, gets better, gets worse, gets better again), and the “Cinderella’’ story (starts low, peaks, drops, peaks again). Vonnegut also suggested that technology might provide a way to test his theory.
“We were inspired to look into story arcs from Vonnegut’s original master’s thesis,’’ says Andrew Reagan, an applied math doctoral student at UVM and lead author of the paper, which was posted online on June 24.
The Vermont team used a technique called sentiment analysis, which measures the emotional content of text using a collection of 10,000 English language words, each tagged with a happiness score. In this scale, words like “laughter,’’ and “excellent’’ score high, while “terrorist,’’ “suicide,’’ and “arrested’’ score low.
After running different statistical processes on 1,700 stories downloaded from the online library Project Gutenberg, they found that the stories sorted into six distinct story arcs — the three Vonnegut had identified, plus three others: “tragedies’’ (a straight progression from happy to sad), “rags to riches’’ stories (a straight progression from sad to happy), and what they term “Oedipus’’ stories (which feature a fall, then a rise, then a final fall).
The Vermont results are consistent with work last year by Matthew Jockers, a professor of English at the University of Nebraska.
Both Reagan’s and Jockers’s work have generated criticism. On July 18, Benjamin Schmidt, a history professor at Northeastern and a prominent figure in the digital humanities, published a blog post in which he characterized the UVM results as “extremely weak,’’ and questioned whether the technique of sentiment analysis — even when done well — is able to say much about plot structure at all.
Schmidt also questioned whether such a thing as master plots really exist.
Yet that won’t stop people from trying to find them. Human beings have deep, instinctive attraction to stories, and we clearly respond to certain kinds of plots — which means the more we can unlock about how plots work, the more we might be able to understand ourselves.
Kevin Hartnett is a writer in South Carolina. He can be reached at kshartnett18@gmail.com.
