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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

The original paper [1] also contains some great graphs. And less hyperbole; these are the six basic plots of ~1400 English-language stories on Project Gutenberg, not of every story in the world, ever

1: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.07772.pdf

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There is also the Kurt Vonnegut "Shape of Stories" concept where he has 8 basic universal plot lines graphed out back in the 1940s

https://thestory.au/articles/kurt-vonnegut-story-shapes/

I hate that they talk about 8 plot lines, but only show graphics for 5.

Skimming the paper: it looks like they are performing sentiment analysis on books, effectively taking the Fourier transform of the sentiment-versus-time data, and reporting which Fourier component (up to 3rd harmonic) is strongest.

I don't see why they stop at the third harmonic, as opposed to the second or the fourth.

Looks like these are just phantom oscillations, a statistical artifact of doing SVD/PCA on smooth data: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.20.545619v1

You get the same patterns in music: https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/67945245/000016_2_.pdf

Those plots are so much better. They also give a sense of the variation around the shape, and are less smoothed than in this article.

Also thumbs up for using self-organising maps. Way underappreciated idea!

For those like me who don't know what a self organizing map is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organizing_map

    A self-organizing map (SOM) or self-organizing feature map (SOFM) is an unsupervised machine learning technique used to produce a low-dimensional (typically two-dimensional) representation of a higher dimensional data set while preserving the topological structure of the data.

More great "diagrams" from mathematician Jean Petitot applying René Thom's morphodynamic models to the study of the canonical formula of myths (Lévy-Strauss).

about 2/3rd in: https://www.persee.fr/docAsPDF/hom_0439-4216_1988_num_28_106...

2016, and the BBC article is 2018.

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