Top all-time · #9923
Matthew L. Jockers
Personal blog · matthewjockers.netdatawriting
Matthew L. Jockers writes Author, a personal blog at matthewjockers.net about data and writing. Since 2015, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times, most often “The Rest of the Story: A Plot Modeling Recipe”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Jockers's posts on sentiment analysis of novels, including the syuzhet R package for extracting plot arcs, and his text-analysis tutorials. Several comments cite his posts as follow-ups or background.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
After a brief, three-month experiment with retirement, I joined Fly Fishers International as President and CEO in September 2026. It is an unexpected but especially gratifying next chapter for me, bringing together a lifetime of fly fishing with much of what I have spent my professional career doing
Most-linked posts?
- The Rest of the Story: A Plot Modeling Recipe2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-03-20
What Hacker News says?
The blog post this was based on ( http://www.matthewjockers.net/2014/06/05/a-novel-method-for-... ) which is from 2014 was widely panned when it was first publicized, and some of the many problems with the methodology pointed out by scholars with more experience and competence with the statistical methods involved. That's how scholarship is supposed to work. However, it will never stop media from seizing on a great…
Comment linking /2014/06/05/a-novel-method-for-detecting-plot/
on “Researchers analysed 1700 novels to reveal six story types”Submitted That Sentimental Feeling: using sentiment analysis as a proxy for plot movement as a story · 21 points
HN discussionThe longer discussion is http://www.matthewjockers.net/2015/03/04/some-thoughts-on-an... (which gives examples of negation that sentiment analysis packages miss, but then some empirical evidence that analysis of sentiment in several literary works doesn't seem to be affected very much by this issue). The antagonist's viewpoint issue appeared in footnote 1 of http://www.matthewjockers.net/2015/02/25/the-rest-of-the-s…
Comment linking /2015/02/25/the-rest-of-the-story/
on “The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes”Submitted The Rest of the Story: A Plot Modeling Recipe as a story · 6 points
HN discussionAny interest in: http://www.matthewjockers.net/2015/02/02/syuzhet/
Comment linking /2015/02/02/syuzhet/
on “The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes”Jockers, in one of his posts, argues that it's less of a problem than you might think because it's a local problem that just adds noise to the data. Plus, his different sentiment analysis techniques seem to more-or-less agree. On the other hand, he tells of showing a graph to his son, of a book his son had read, and being told the graph was completely wrong for part of the book---it turns out that part of the book w…
Comment linking /2015/02/02/syuzhet/
on “The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes”Last year, Matthew Jockers, an English professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, had a series of blog posts on the subject[1]---I haven't heard of any actual publications from the work---that was pretty interesting. I haven't read this paper yet (this post is falling off HN too fast!) but his technique was to use sentence-level sentiment analysis to get a time-varying signal, rub a Fourier transform against i…
Comment linking /2015/02/02/syuzhet/
on “The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes”Here's a good place to start: http://www.matthewjockers.net/text-analysis-with-r-for-stude...
Comment linking /text-analysis-with-r-for-students-of-literature/
on “Ask HN: What are the best tools for analyzing large bodies of text?”- nl · 2016-09-16
It would be interesting if the author had speculated why the correlation for The Lovely Bones seems quite a lot worse than the other. Interestingly, all three methods seems to correlation much worse on that book than the others. I haven't read it so I can't speculate myself. Edit, there is a more recent post on this topic too: http://www.matthewjockers.net/2016/08/11/more-syuzhet-valida...
Comment linking /2016/08/11/more-syuzhet-validation/
on “That Sentimental Feeling: using sentiment analysis as a proxy for plot movement” Full title (too long to fit the 80 character limit): An R package for the extraction of sentiment and sentiment-based plot arcs from text Article: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/computers-find-that-there-a... Author's blog: http://www.matthewjockers.net/
Comment linking /
on “Syuzhet: Extraction of sentiment-based plot arcs from text”
