There is also the Kurt Vonnegut "Shape of Stories" concept where he has 8 basic universal plot lines graphed out back in the 1940s

https://thestory.au/articles/kurt-vonnegut-story-shapes/

I hate that they talk about 8 plot lines, but only show graphics for 5.

Those plots are so much better. They also give a sense of the variation around the shape, and are less smoothed than in this article.

Also thumbs up for using self-organising maps. Way underappreciated idea!

For those like me who don't know what a self organizing map is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organizing_map

    A self-organizing map (SOM) or self-organizing feature map (SOFM) is an unsupervised machine learning technique used to produce a low-dimensional (typically two-dimensional) representation of a higher dimensional data set while preserving the topological structure of the data.

Skimming the paper: it looks like they are performing sentiment analysis on books, effectively taking the Fourier transform of the sentiment-versus-time data, and reporting which Fourier component (up to 3rd harmonic) is strongest.

I don't see why they stop at the third harmonic, as opposed to the second or the fourth.

Looks like these are just phantom oscillations, a statistical artifact of doing SVD/PCA on smooth data: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.20.545619v1

You get the same patterns in music: https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/67945245/000016_2_.pdf

More great "diagrams" from mathematician Jean Petitot applying René Thom's morphodynamic models to the study of the canonical formula of myths (Lévy-Strauss).

about 2/3rd in: https://www.persee.fr/docAsPDF/hom_0439-4216_1988_num_28_106...

[delayed]