(Roughly) Daily

Kurt Vonnegut took an early interest in what he considered the fundamental “shapes” of stories…

Stories have very simple shapes, ones that computers can understand.

This was the basic idea behind the master’s thesis that Kurt Vonnegut submitted to the anthropology department at the University of Chicago. It was rejected, however, “because it was so simple and looked like too much fun,” Vonnegut said…

“Kurt Vonnegut on the 8 ‘shapes’ of stories“

He never abandoned the idea. Years later, in a 2004 lecture at Case Western University, he shared his theory– a recording of which has washed around the internet ever sense…

Now, a group of academics have used AI to analyze hundreds of published stories, and have confirmed Vonnegut’s contention (sort of: he argued for 8 “shapes”; they found 6), as they explain in the abstract of their paper…

Advances in computing power, natural language processing, and digitization of text now make it possible to study a culture’s evolution through its texts using a ‘big data’ lens. Our ability to communicate relies in part upon a shared emotional experience, with stories often following distinct emotional trajectories and forming patterns that are meaningful to us. Here, by classifying the emotional arcs for a filtered subset of 1,327 stories from Project Gutenberg’s fiction collection, we find a set of six core emotional arcs which form the essential building blocks of complex emotional trajectories. We strengthen our findings by separately applying matrix decomposition, supervised learning, and unsupervised learning. For each of these six core emotional arcs, we examine the closest characteristic stories in publication today and find that particular emotional arcs enjoy greater success, as measured by downloads…

“The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes” (where you can read/download the full paper).

* Kurt Vonnegut

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As we agnize archetypes, we might spare a thought for a master of the entertaining tale, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (or as he’s better known by his stage name, Molière); he died on this date in 1673. A playwright, actor, and poet, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in world history, and possibly the greatest writer in French history. His extant works include comedies, farces, tragicomedies, comédie-ballets, and more. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed at the Comédie-Française more often than those of any other playwright today.  His influence is such that the French language is often referred to as the “language of Molière.”

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