Making art and making stuff you think people will like are not mutually exclusive.
(I am very serious about this, by the way - if you have expertise in analytics for storytelling, or even just interesting ideas for same, please shoot me an email.)
http://slashdot.org/topic/bi/can-big-data-prevent-hollywoods...
Here is a white paper on how to roll out you movie based upon "data scientist" analysis.
http://www.google.com/think/research-studies/quantifying-mov...
I have no idea why you are seduced by this? Whistler likened painting portraits (which he was paid very well for) to prostitution and on his own time & dime gave us his nocturne paintings which ultimately inspiring Monet in the process.
http://www.stargonaut.com/trialog.html
Analytics tells you where you have been not where you are going. Novelty changes everything and analytics can't predict innovation. That is why Hollywood and the music industry suck.
Why I'm interested: because much like money, analytics are a terrible master but a wonderful servant.
If you're ruled by them, I agree, that's limiting - but if what they're doing is providing useful information about your audience, that's invaluable. This is particularly true if you're a recording-based artist (I am), as it partially allows you to restore the feedback that you'd get from a live audience.
As many people have said, before you can break the rules you should probably understand them. Likewise, before you go against audience expectations it's helpful to know what they expect.
I think step zero for any kind of "story analysis" would be extracting structured data from the raw text--pulling out things like emotions, foreshadowing, revelations, and so on. This is pretty interesting because I don't know that I've ever heard of this type of thing--for the most part text analysis focuses on things like sentiment, topic extraction and so on. There may be some fertile ground here for new types of analyses based on how stories work.
Curious to hear your thoughts... feel free to drop me a line as well to chat more, jason [at] applieddatalabs [dot] com
In regards to topic or plot extraction I would start with "The Seven Basic Plots - Why We Tell Stories" by Christopher Booker:
The Guardian review: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/nov/21/fiction.feature... )
and then break down which plots in both literature and film are "fashionable" or why they work.. We are off topic now, I will take this of line