Text Analyzer Reveals Emotional 'Temperature' of Novels and Fairy Tales 65
KentuckyFC writes "Stories are a powerful channel for communicating emotions. But while they have been studied in detail by generations of critics, there is little in the way of objective tools for analyzing and comparing their emotional content. That looks set to change thanks to one data mining researcher who has applied the process of sentiment analysis to novels and fairy tales that have been digitized on Project Gutenburg and the Google Books Corpus. The results show the density of emotions in different parts of a story and how the emotional 'temperature' changes throughout the tale. For example, this guy has used the technique to compare the emotional content of the entire collection of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales to reveal that the darkest story is a tale called Gambling Hansel; clearly a lesson to us all."
The "eight fundamental emotions" (Score:4, Interesting)
From TFA:
Analysing the emotional content of text is also becoming easier. In recent years, researchers have built up significant databases of the emotions that a given word evokes. This is part of the new field of sentiment analysis in which common words are categorised as positive, negative or neutral and associated with one of the eight fundamental emotions—joy, sadness, anger, fear, trust, disgust, surprise and anticipation.
I don't know about anyone else, but I found that bit as fascinating as the text analyzer itself. But where does laughter fit? Shouldn't it count as a fundamental emotion? Or is it considered just a sub-category of "surprise" or "joy"?
In any case, I wonder if someone could combine all that with the 36 dramatic situations [wikipedia.org] and a few other components, and create a program that writes stories....
Gambling Hansel: not dark at all (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't find it dark at all, not nearly as dark as the tales Disney sanitized. I mean, it's about a gambler who beats both God and the Devil even if he has lousy luck with mortals prior to getting rigged cards and dice.