The emotional arcs of horror: a distant reading of Stephen King’s novels
Woods, Delaney
Woods, Delaney
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Abstract
Sentiment analysis, the computational inference of emotion in text through Natural Language Processing, is increasingly used to analyze social and cultural trends. In this thesis, we create narrative time-series and word-shift graphs for each of Stephen King’s novels using the Hedonometer, quantifying the lexical changes responsible for emotional arcs found in each story. Our results suggest King’s work has increasingly shifted in genre from horror to science fiction. The work contributes to a growing science of stories being developed by the Computational Story Lab.
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Date
2022-01-01