{"id":83839,"date":"2015-03-19T20:22:44","date_gmt":"2015-03-20T00:22:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=83839"},"modified":"2015-03-20T12:18:34","modified_gmt":"2015-03-20T16:18:34","slug":"man-in-hole-ii-man-in-deeper-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/19\/man-in-hole-ii-man-in-deeper-hole\/","title":{"rendered":"Man in Hole II: Man in Deeper Hole"},"content":{"rendered":"

Assigning emotional values to words.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"happy-sad-faces_620\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Last month I wrote about Matthew Jockers\u2019s research on the shapes of stories<\/a>, which has since met with a welter of reactions within and without academe<\/a>. His critics ask two questions, essentially: Is it really possible to assign every word a reliable emotional valence? And even if the answer is yes, can we really claim that all the plots in the history of literature take so few basic forms?<\/p>\n

A rough primer: Jockers uses a tool called \u201csentiment analysis\u201d to gauge \u201cthe relationship between sentiment and plot shape in fiction\u201d; algorithms assign every word in a novel a positive or negative emotional value, and in compiling these values he\u2019s able to graph the shifts in a story\u2019s narrative. A lot of negative words mean something bad is happening, a lot of positive words mean something good is happening. Ultimately, he derived six archetypal plot shapes<\/a>. (To his credit and my chagrin, he\u2019s refrained from giving them catchy names.) Here\u2019s an example: <\/p>\n

\"arch_11\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Annie Swafford, a professor at SUNY<\/small> New Paltz, found some problems with Jockers\u2019s methods<\/a>. For one, his program couldn\u2019t always detect the beginnings and ends of sentences; more gravely, it sometimes bungled or oversimplified the emotions of the sentences it read. \u201cI am extremely happy today\u201d and \u201cThere is no happiness left in me,\u201d for example, it read as equally positive. And, as she points out,<\/p>\n

\n

Longer sentences may be given greater positivity or negativity than their contents warrant, merely because they have greater number of positive or negative words. For instance, \u201cI am extremely happy!\u201d would have a lower positivity ranking than \u201cWell, I\u2019m not really happy; today, I spilled my delicious, glorious coffee on my favorite shirt and it will never be clean again.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cFrankly, I don\u2019t think any\u00a0of the current sentiment detection methods are especially\u00a0reliable,\u201d Jockers wrote in a response<\/a>. \u201cSentiment is a subtle and nuanced thing \u2026 We would probably find a good deal of human agreement when it comes to the extremes of sentiment, but there are a lot of tricky cases, gray areas where I\u2019m not sure we would all agree.\u201d<\/p>\n

And those gray areas, Swafford fears<\/a>, comprise much of literature. No sentiment-analysis tool would know what to make of a sentence such as \u201cWell, it\u2019s like a potato,\u201d which could, depending on context, have a positive or negative spin\u2014I like potatoes, but there are few things in my life I\u2019d favorably compare to one. \u201cOur evaluations are pure guesswork,\u201d Swafford writes: \u201cwe hope that phrases like \u2018not good\u2019 and \u2018like a potato\u2019 don\u2019t happen too often; we hope that sarcasm and satire are infrequent enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019d written in my last post<\/a> that \u201cmost words have a fairly straightforward sentimental value.\u201d A commenter on Twitter said, \u201cYou can\u2019t really believe that\u2019s how language works.\u201d But I do. For most words\u2014lamppost<\/em>, run<\/em>,\u00a0zoological\u2014<\/em>that value is zero or slightly variable. I think almost every English speaker would agree, though, that bad<\/em> has a negative sentimental value. Yes, Michael Jackson called one of his albums Bad<\/em>, and his use was predicated on the exact opposite<\/em> value\u2014but there\u2019s no one using bad <\/em>as slang for \u201creally good\u201d who\u2019s ignorant of the word\u2019s traditional valence. (Thankfully, hardly anyone is using bad <\/em>as slang at all anymore.) Likewise, if I tell my friend, with a sardonic edge to my voice and tears streaming down my face, that I\u2019m doing just great, his sense of great<\/em>\u2019s general positivity won\u2019t be shaken to its very core. He\u2019ll just know that I\u2019m being glib.<\/p>\n

Still, these instances of irony and tone raise major concerns about sentiment analysis. In a series of tweets, Jacob Eisenstein<\/a> pursued an especially astute line of questioning:<\/p>\n

\n

True, sentiment analysis is not perfect, but \u201cperfect\u201d implies that scoring the sentiment of every part of a novel is a meaningful goal. Worrying about negation, and even irony and satire, implies that true sentiment is waiting to be discovered, if we could solve these problems. Does positive sentiment mean things are good for the protagonist? For the rest of the fictional world? For the reader?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For the would-be sentiment analyst, these look like tall hurdles, but they might have answers that we could readily agree on. \u201cTrue sentiment\u201d is<\/em>, beneath the veneer of irony, \u201cwaiting to be discovered\u201d; assuming we can develop an algorithm sophisticated enough to discern ordinary, stable badness from your Michael Jackson\u2013type Bad<\/em>nesses, it wouldn\u2019t be prohibitively difficult to account for writers\u2019 irony.<\/p>\n

And when we track \u201cpositive sentiment,\u201d we do mean, I think, that things are good for the protagonist or the narrator. There are, of course, plenty of novels where the hero is so inured to contemporary life that almost nothing is positive or negative. There are novels where the hero is so self-loathing that he considers it good when bad things happen to him. And there are novels with so many changes in perspective, at such a remove from conventions in point of view, that it would be ridiculous to claim that they have protagonists at all. But they\u2019re all affixed, however tenuously, to concepts of sentiment\u2014we\u2019re always rooting, somehow, for someone or something. And if none of these forms are outside the grasp of a good reader, why would they elude a good algorithm?<\/p>\n

Jockers has yet to publish his official research paper, so this discussion is deeply preliminary*. Most academics seem to be watching with cautious optimism. But in the wings there are two factions forming. First are those who fear that the entire edifice of literature has crumbled before the shapely contours of data, who regard all work in the digital humanities as trivial\u2014who maintain that the best fiction is of such consummate artfulness and sensitivity that any attempt to find patterns in it is crass and ignorant, a fool\u2019s errand. And I sympathize. I don\u2019t think emotions can be fully quantified. The experience of being alive does not reduce neatly to a formula. But if \u201cart breaks the sea that\u2019s frozen inside us,\u201d as Kafka wrote, it does so by appealing to our feelings, and these, like it or not, have limits, albeit hazy ones. If every sentiment were unrecognizably unique, no one would have any intuition for what someone else was feeling; art would be useless. If we can agree that literature speaks to certain baselines of positive and negative\u2014feeling good, feeling bad, feeling alive or dead\u2014then there\u2019s a firm basis for all kinds of data-driven research. To claim otherwise would be precious.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, even if we were to induce\u2014with 99 percent certainty and the most cunning algorithms in history\u2014six fundamental shapes for literary plots \u2026 what then? Would writers tear their hair out trying to invent new ones? Would students arrive at a more refined understanding of how stories work, or why we\u2019re so intent on telling them? Would Madame Bovary<\/em> and Middlemarch<\/em> unfurl before us with unseen glories? There\u2019s a lot that\u2019s instructive in projects like Jockers\u2019s, but what a blinkered existence it would be to pursue them exclusively. You\u2019d risk winding up with a rigid, holistic data set that knows everything about literature except why we want to read it.<\/p>\n

Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of <\/em>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n

*My thanks to Eileen Clancy, who told me about the reactions to Jockers\u2019s research and who published this timeline<\/a> to clarify those reactions. I should also note that I\u2019ve completely omitted many of the facets in these arguments\u2014mostly a discussion of graph foundations involving such things as ringing artifacts and Gaussian filters\u2014because they\u2019re beyond my ken.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Assigning emotional values to words. Last month I wrote about Matthew Jockers\u2019s research on the shapes of stories, which has since met with a welter of reactions within and without academe. His critics ask two questions, essentially: Is it really possible to assign every word a reliable emotional valence? And even if the answer is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[17489,17486,16906,17,8073,17488,71,3020,16905,16907,17487,2393],"class_list":["post-83839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-academe","tag-anne-swafford","tag-archetypes","tag-books","tag-data","tag-emotion","tag-fiction","tag-kurt-vonnegut","tag-matthew-jockers","tag-plots","tag-valence","tag-words"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat\u2019s the Emotional Value of a Word?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A sequel to last month\u2019s post about turning plots into data points asks, Can we reliably say that certain words have \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cbad\u201d meanings?\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/19\/man-in-hole-ii-man-in-deeper-hole\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Man in Hole II: Man in Deeper Hole by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 19, 2015 \u2013 Assigning emotional values to words. Last month I wrote about Matthew Jockers\u2019s research on the shapes of stories, which has since met with a welter of\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/19\/man-in-hole-ii-man-in-deeper-hole\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-03-20T00:22:44+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2015-03-20T16:18:34+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/happy-sad-faces_620.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"302\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" 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