Ready? Set..... Go! 1) The "plot" of a story.... A series of events.... Normally characterized by "intro", "buildup", "climax", and "conclusion", or whatever other arbitrary label one might fancy to attribute to a section of a piece of literatute.... 2) Mathematically, the "plot" of a story is a series of points in some (albeit somewhat strange) space where concepts like love, violence, disgruntleness, etc... are quantified. 3) The difference between two chronologically adjacent points, or as physicist are wont to say: "the derivative with respect to time (though with respect to page might be better)", would represent an underlying theme of the story.... 4) Any one want to analyze a story in this fashion and post the analysis? I'd like to find a good story, and see how different our analyses are ..... Perhaps different results could be mapped to each other via some change of reference/basis? 5) I'd put this in the literature section, but I don't think they would know what a derivative is.
Hi Sinyud, welcome to SciForums. Interesting idea. Do you know if anyone has done something like this? Obviously the most difficult part would be the mapping of a piece of literature to some real space. Once that was accomplished the numerical derivatives would just be like any other numerical derivatives. You could probably get some decent results by simply doing word counts. If the frequency of each word were an axis then you could probably do a principal components analysis and basically get a thesaurus, or a linear discriminant analysis to automatically classify books by genre. Hehe. -Dale
Hey Dale, The word-count sounds cool, though I'm hoping to blend emotions and math.... I think this would be my response to people who tell me that physics and math are devoid of emotion. My respose is two pronged 1) Physicists are some of the most passionate people I know. Any attempt to describe my love of physics in a short post would be like trying to replicate Bethoveens 5th symphony with a squeaky rubber duck. 2) In the spirit of the previous post, if a story can be mapped into a "space", then saying that "physics is devoid of any emtion", would as absurd as saying "water is devoid of any ocean".
Since, in literature, emotions are conveyed through the use of specific words I think it would fall out pretty naturally. For example, if you simply analyzed several random novels using the word count and PCA I suspect that you would automatically get several large principal components corresponding to emotions like "love", "anger", "fear", etc. Action novels would have large "anger" components while romances would have large "love" components. I don't think that any modification to the standard PCA would be needed to get such results. -Dale
Remember this? Understanding Poetry, by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D. "To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme, and figures of speech. Then ask two questions: One, how artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered, and two, how important is that objective. Question one rates the poem's perfection, question two rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining a poem's greatest becomes a relatively simple matter. "If the poem's score for perfection is plotted along the horizontal of a graph, and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness." And the reply, of course: Excrement. That's what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard. We're not laying pipe, we're talking about poetry. I mean, how can you describe poetry like American Bandstand? "I like Byron, I give him a 42, but I can't dance to it." … Armies of academics going forward, measuring poetry. No, we will not have that here. No more of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard. Now in my class you will learn to think for yourselves again. You will learn to savor words and language. No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world. ... We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are all noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman: "O me, o life of the questions of these recurring, of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities filled with the foolish. What good amid these, o me, o life? Answer: that you are here. That life exists, and identity. That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?
I'm actually interested to see how it pans out, because it's related to my research area of analysing online communications. It sounds like you're talking about a technique called Content Analysis. Content Analysis has a very broad range of practical applications, so there has been a large amount of research into it (for example, see papers on:thematic analysis of philosophical texts, applications of content analysis in healthcare, content analysis of Shakespeare's sonnets, and Word Use in the Poetry of Suicidal and Nonsuicidal Poets), and several computerised tools developed. See The General Inquirer homepage for possibly the oldest and most well known tool. It was originally built in the early sixties at MIT. Online Java version. Google Scholar is a great resource for finding more good online and offline resources.
