Advances in computing power and natural language processing now allow us to study a culture’s evolution through its texts. Stories often follow distinct emotional trajectories and form patterns that are meaningful to us. By analyzing the emotional arcs of 1,327 stories from Project Gutenberg’s fiction collection, researchers have identified six core emotional arcs that are essential building blocks of complex emotional trajectories. These emotional arcs have been found to correlate with the success of stories, as measured by downloads. These findings have been confirmed through matrix decomposition, supervised learning, and unsupervised learning. This research provides new insights into the emotional experiences evoked by written stories and their impact on readers.
https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0093-1