Emotional Waves of a Plot in Literary Texts: New Approaches for Investigation of the Dynamics in Digital Culture

Abstract

Digital technologies provide new opportunities for the study of objects of cultural heritage. The paper deals with investigation of the dynamics in literary and musical texts. It is hypothesized that, from a linguistic point of view, it is not by accident that the action in text develops from the beginning (the exposure) through the introduction to the climax, and from the climax to the denouement, but it always has a certain tendency, which can be visualized. In the given research three ʻsmall genres’ are being investigated: Russian short stories, Russian classical sonnets, and classical Russian romances which belong to a hybrid genre of both musical and verbal nature. Generalized profiles of the plot development were made by means of statistical time series method, but with different parameters for different genres. Thus, literary texts were analysed based on measurement of sentence length, poetry texts were measured by stress index, whereas romances were measured both by poetry stress index and musical pitch/duration index. The other variables related to plot development may be used as well. The dynamics of each genre is visualized by means of curves resembling the ʻline of beauty’ proposed by William Hogarth. In conclusion, the received results are compared with dynamic contours obtained by applying sentiment analysis to a big data collection of texts belonging to world classical literature. The obtained results testify that there exist some universal regularities in text and plot generation, which may be revealed independently to research methodology.