What Story Category Are You?

• Researchers from the University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide have created a machine called The Hedonometer that uses natural language processing and sentiment analysis to map the narrative patterns of literature.
• The Hedonometer analysed 1,737 English-language works of fiction between 10,000 and 200,000 words long from Project Gutenberg.
• The machine identified six broad categories of story: rags to riches, riches to rags, man in a hole, Icarus, Cinderella and Oedipus.
• The machine found that one-fifth of all the works it analysed were rags-to-riches stories, which was less popular with readers than Oedipus, Man in a Hole and Cinderella.
• The researchers promise they did not control the outcome of the experiment.
• The machine's analysis is comparable to work from the comparative mythology school of James Frazier and Joseph Campbell.
• Kurt Vonnegut used more or less the same methodology as the machine to come up with eight universal story arcs or "shapes of stories".
• Vonnegut left out the rags to riches category, calling it an anomaly, but included the Cinderella arc.
• The researchers assume that math and language are interchangeable, and that sentences, integers and lines of code are telling the same stories.
• The machine's analysis raises questions about the difference between humans and machines.

"Discover Your Story Arc: Take the Hedonometer-Inspired Quiz!" Explore the six broad categories of story identified by The Hedonometer, a machine that uses natural language processing and sentiment analysis to map narrative patterns. Are you a rags-to-riches protagonist, or do you follow the man in a hole arc? This quiz, inspired by the groundbreaking research of the University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide, will help you uncover the universal story arc that best describes your own journey.