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Stories

See The Shapes of Stories :emotional-arcs:.

Gambit game simulator used in the paper above   stories

The Plagiarism Plot Is Having a Moment. Copy That.   stories

Not every day your work gets mentioned in the NYT!

But seven, too, was not destined to last. In 2016, data scientists at the University of Vermont, exploiting advances in natural language processing, plugged 1,737 stories scraped from the Project Gutenberg website into a software program in order to chart their “emotional arcs.” Their custom “hedonometer” examined each story in blocks of 10,000 words, assigning a “meaningful sentiment score” to every chunk, and allowing the researchers to express the results as a series of nifty graphs. The one for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” shows a mountain range of peaks and valleys, ending, after Voldemort is finally killed, on a steep upward incline toward a summit at happily ever after. The study made news: The world’s stories boiled down to “six basic shapes.”

Here's a copy of the article.

Last modified: May 21, 2025