Correlations between GoodReads Appreciation and the Sentiment Arc Fractality of the Grimm brothers' Fairy Tales

:speech_balloon: Speaker: Yuri Bizzoni, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Ida Marie S. Lassen and Kristoffer Nielbo

:classical_building: Affiliation: 1, Center for Humanities Computing Aarhus, Aarhus University, Jens Chr. Skous Vej 4, Building 1483,DK-8000 Aarhus C; 2, School of Communication and Culture - Comparative Literature, Aarhus University, Langelandsgade 139, Building 1580, DK-8000 Aarhus C, \; 3, Center for Humanities Computing Aarhus , &, Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University, Jens Chr. Skous Vej 4, Building 1483, 3rd floor, DK-8000 Aarhus C

Title: Correlations between GoodReads Appreciation and the Sentiment Arc Fractality of the Grimm brothers’ Fairy Tales

Abstract: Despite their widespread popularity, fairy tales are often overlooked when studying literary quality with quantitative approaches. We present a study on the relation between sentiment fractality and literary appreciation by testing the hypothesis that fairy tales with a good balance between unpredictability and excessive self-similarity in their sentiment narrative arcs tend to be more popular and more appreciated by audiences of readers. In short, we perform a correlation study of the degree of fractality of the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers and their current appreciation as measured by their Goodreads scores. Moreover, we look at the popularity of these fairy tales through time, determining which ones have come to form a strong “internal canon” in the corpus of the authors and which one have fallen into relative obscurity.

:newspaper: Link to paper

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I’m wondering if the length of a story/text plays a role in the sweet spot of fractality. E.g. does a longer text require a higher/lower Hurst exponent to be appreciated than a shorter text? And what would it mean if length does or does not play a role?