2/20/2024 0 Comments Stories similar to icarusThis portion of the research is fascinating in and of itself: The 10 words that people ranked as happiest were laughter, happiness, love, happy, laughed, laugh, laughing, excellent, laughs, and joy. The researchers assigned individual happiness scores to more than 10,000 frequently-used words by crowdsourcing the effort on the website Mechanical Turk. They did this by training the machine to take all the words of the book, section by section, and measure the average happiness of a given bag of words based on how an individual word scored. They collected computer-generated story arcs for nearly 2,000 works of fiction, classifying each into one of six core types of narratives (based on what happens to the protagonist): That’s what a group of researchers, from the University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide, set out to do. It’s also possible to ask a computer to identify the shapes of stories for you. Vonnegut had mapped stories by hand, but in 2016, with sophisticated computing power, natural language processing, and reams of digitized text, it’s possible to map the narrative patterns in a huge corpus of literature. And 35 years later, his idea had resonated enough with a group of mathematicians and computer scientists that they decided to build an experiment around it. Vonnegut, in his ever charming way, was quite pleased with himself for making this connection. “And then I saw the rise to bliss at the end was identical with the expectation of redemption as expressed in primitive Christianity. And then I saw that the stroke of midnight looked exactly like the unique creation myth in the Old Testament.” Cinderella’s curfew was, if you look at it on Vonnegut’s chart, a mirror-image downfall to Adam and Eve’s ejection from the Garden of Eden. “Those steps at the beginning look like the creation myth of virtually every society on earth. This may not seem like anything special, Vonnegut says-his actual words are, “it certainly looks like trash”-until he notices another well known story that shares this shape. Before too long, though, the Cinderella graph is marked by a sharp leap back to good fortune, what with the whole business of (spoiler alert) the glass slipper fitting and the happily ever after. Vonnegut visualizes its arc as a staircase-like climb in good fortune representing the arrival of Cinderella’s fairy godmother, leading all the way to a high point at the ball, followed by a sudden plummet back to ill fortune at the stroke of midnight. The most interesting shape to him, it turned out, was the one that reflected the tale of Cinderella, of all stories. “The shape of the curve is what matters.” “This is an exercise in relativity, really,” Vonnegut explains. The X-axis represents the chronology of the story, from beginning to end, while the Y-axis represents the experience of the protagonist, on a spectrum of ill fortune to good fortune. That explanation comes from a lecture he gave, and which you can still watch on YouTube, that involves Vonnegut mapping the narrative arc of popular storylines along a simple graph. It was, essentially, this: “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers. (“It was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun,” Vonnegut explained.) But he continued to carry the idea with him for many years after that, and spoke publicly about it more than once. “My prettiest contribution to my culture,” the writer Kurt Vonnegut mused in his 1981 autobiography Palm Sunday, “was a master’s thesis in anthropology which was rejected by the University of Chicago a long time ago.”īy then, he said, the thesis had long since vanished.
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