This distinction between the emotional arc and the plot of a story is one point of misunderstanding in other work that has drawn criticism from the digital humanities community. The emotional arc of a story does not give us direct information about the plot or the intended meaning of the story, but rather exists as part of the whole narrative ( e.g., an emotional arc showing a fall in sentiment throughout a story may arise from very different plot and structure combinations). While the plot captures the mechanics of a narrative and the structure encodes their delivery, in the present work we examine the emotional arc that is invoked through the words used. In our present treatment, we consider the plot as the ‘backbone’ of events that occur in a chronological sequence (more detail on previous theories of plot are in Appendix A in Additional file 1). This is sometimes referred to as narratology, which at its core is ‘a series of events, real or fictional, presented to the reader or the listener’. A major component of folkloristics is the study of society and culture through literary analysis. We objectively test aspects of the theories of folkloristics, specifically the commonality of core stories within societal boundaries. Here, we use a simple, robust sentiment analysis tool to extract the reader-perceived emotional content of written stories as they unfold on the page. An often integral part of a written story is the emotional experience that is evoked in the reader. Without evolved cues from tone, facial expression, or body language, written stories are forced to capture the entire transfer of experience on a page. We seek to better understand stories that are captured and shared in written form, a medium that since inception has radically changed how information flows. We tend to prefer stories that fit into the molds which are familiar, and reject narratives that do not align with our experience. In science, we formalize the ideas that best fit our experience with principles such as Occam’s Razor: The simplest story is the one we should trust. Stories are encoded in art, language, and even in the mathematics of physics: We use equations to represent both simple and complicated functions that describe our observations of the real world. We are fundamentally driven to find and tell stories, likened to Pan Narrans or Homo Narrativus. The power of stories to transfer information and define our own existence has been shown time and again.
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