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Questions and Answers
What is The Hedonometer?
What is The Hedonometer?
- A machine that analyses works of non-fiction
- A machine that identifies six broad categories of story
- A machine that controls the outcome of experiments
- A machine that uses natural language processing and sentiment analysis to map the narrative patterns of literature (correct)
How many English-language works of fiction did The Hedonometer analyse?
How many English-language works of fiction did The Hedonometer analyse?
- 2,000
- 500
- 1,737 (correct)
- 1,000
What are the six broad categories of story identified by The Hedonometer?
What are the six broad categories of story identified by The Hedonometer?
- War, peace, power, corruption, justice, freedom
- Rags to riches, riches to rags, man in a hole, Icarus, Cinderella and Oedipus (correct)
- Comedy, tragedy, romance, adventure, mystery, horror
- Love, hate, fear, joy, anger, sadness
Which of the six broad categories of story was less popular with readers than the others?
Which of the six broad categories of story was less popular with readers than the others?
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Who used a similar methodology to The Hedonometer to come up with eight universal story arcs?
Who used a similar methodology to The Hedonometer to come up with eight universal story arcs?
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Which story arc did Kurt Vonnegut leave out of his analysis?
Which story arc did Kurt Vonnegut leave out of his analysis?
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What assumption do the researchers make about math and language?
What assumption do the researchers make about math and language?
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Study Notes
- 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.
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