syuzhet

Last year, Matthew Jockers, an English professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, had a series of blog posts on the subject[1]---I haven't heard of any actual publications from the work---that was pretty interesting. I haven't read this paper yet (this post is falling off HN too fast!) but his technique was to use sentence-level sentiment analysis to get a time-varying signal, rub a Fourier transform against it, cut off all but the lowest frequencies, and returned it to the time domain to draw pretty pictures. He, too, came up with six basic arcs, I think, probably for the same reason that klue07 mentions but using statistics against a bunch of books. There was a certain amount of press coverage at the time. The R package, syuzhet, is available on github[2]. Also, you can look at my notes on playing wiht syuzhet and R[3]. [1] Starti