The Dynamical Principles of Storytelling
Computation and Language
2023-10-02 v2
Abstract
When considering the opening part of 1800 short stories, we find that the first dozen paragraphs of the average narrative follow an action principle as defined in arXiv:2309.06600. When the order of the paragraphs is shuffled, the average no longer exhibits this property. The findings show that there is a preferential direction we take in semantic space when starting a story, possibly related to a common Western storytelling tradition as implied by Aristotle in Poetics.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2309.07797,
title = {The Dynamical Principles of Storytelling},
author = {Isidoros Doxas and James Meiss and Steven Bottone and Tom Strelich and Andrew Plummer and Adrienne Breland and Simon Dennis and Kathy Garvin-Doxas and Michael Klymkowsky},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.07797},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
6 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables