Fractal Sentiments and Fairy Tales - Fractal scaling of narrative arcs as predictor of the perceived quality of Andersen's fairy tales - Archive ouverte HAL
Article Dans Une Revue Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities Année : 2022

Fractal Sentiments and Fairy Tales - Fractal scaling of narrative arcs as predictor of the perceived quality of Andersen's fairy tales

Résumé

This article explores the sentiment dynamics present in narratives and their contribution to literary appreciation. Specifically, we investigate whether a certain type of sentiment development in a literary narrative correlates with its quality as perceived by a large number of readers. While we do not expect a story's sentiment arc to relate directly to readers' appreciation, we focus on its internal coherence as measured by its sentiment arc's level of fractality as a potential predictor of literary quality. To measure the arcs' fractality we use the Hurst exponent, a popular measure of fractal patterns that reflects the predictability or self-similarity of a time series. We apply this measure to the fairy tales of H.C. Andersen, using GoodReads' scores to approximate their level of appreciation. Based on our results we suggest that there might be an optimal balance between predictability and surprise in a sentiment arcs' structure that contributes to the perceived quality of a narrative text.
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Dates et versions

hal-03591862 , version 1 (28-02-2022)
hal-03591862 , version 2 (11-04-2022)
hal-03591862 , version 3 (31-05-2022)

Identifiants

Citer

Yuri Bizzoni, Telma Peura, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Kristoffer Nielbo. Fractal Sentiments and Fairy Tales - Fractal scaling of narrative arcs as predictor of the perceived quality of Andersen's fairy tales. Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities, In press, NLP4DH, ⟨10.46298/jdmdh.9154⟩. ⟨hal-03591862v3⟩
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