

Multidimensional analysis of plot arcs in thousands of TV and movie scripts - jvmiert
http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2014/12/fundamental-plot-arcs-seen-through.html

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blowski
Can someone explain how the author classified the topics? As I understood the
article (and to be honest, I didn't understand it very well) he:

1\. Takes a corpus of 'words often used in topic X'

2\. Compares that corpus to the script, divided into 12 sections

3\. Gives a value to how much the corpus corresponds to the script

A couple of things which interested me:

* Finding original films - would it be possible to come up with a list of films which have been manually classified as 'romantic' but which don't follow the standard 'romance' plot arc?

* Unusual direction or editing - Are there films for which the dialogue can't be used to classify what's going on? Perhaps analysing the soundtrack (loudness, bpm, minor vs major keys) and the video (brightness, colouring, movement) and comparing it to the dialogue would show something interesting.

* Compare the 'deviation from the norm' to reviews, awards, box office takings, and press coverage.

Unfortunately, I have absolutely no idea how to do something like that. Just
wondering if it's been done before.

~~~
bvm
Answering your first question:

Latent Dirichlet Allocation
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation)
)

~~~
iliis
He links to a good explanation about topic modeling and LDA:
[http://tedunderwood.com/2012/04/07/topic-modeling-made-
just-...](http://tedunderwood.com/2012/04/07/topic-modeling-made-just-simple-
enough/)

~~~
blowski
Thank you both.

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gayprogrammer
What is "unknown" that is included in the graphs? It is not explained. Title
only mentions tv and movie scripts.

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sumitviii
This analysis shows the already known 3 act structure of most plays. Is it a
cross cultural phenomenon?

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fit2rule
Some would say so:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots)

~~~
pmoriarty
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-
Six_Dramatic_Situat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-
Six_Dramatic_Situations)

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Fiahil
This is very good. I wonder if this could be used to describe someone's
personal taste in movies.

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jevgeni
"twelfths"? Why isn't the word count measured in French metric quarts of ink,
then? I'm disappointed.

P.S. Cool article though.

~~~
blowski
Any unit of measurement would have been arbitrary, and twelfths at least lets
you refer to the first third, quarter or half. No idea whether that was the
rationale, but I don't think any other division would have seriously affected
the point the article is making.

~~~
jevgeni
Well, if the point of the study would change with the choice of the units,
then the study isn't that good, is it? :)

I'm not arguing the point. I'm arguing, that using twelfths has not utility
over using per cent, for example, but is counter-intuitive.

