Monday, September 16, 2013
Scientists can tell which vampire books will have the Twilight effect
A group of scientists has developed a system to tell which books and films have similar narrative styles and structures by looking at the relationship between the words inside them.
Joseph Reddington, Fionn Murtagh and Douglas Cowie have published a paper about collaborative writing, which looks into similarities between books and films, as well as differences in style within a single book.
The group creates data visualisations from information about how frequently a common word, such as "of" or "and" is used. This can determine different genres and patterns of writing.
Reddington used the system to compare books about vampires, including the popular young adult series of Twilight novels, by Stephenie Meyer, The Vampire Chronicles by gothic writer Anne Rice and Carpe Jugulum, the first of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels to feature vampires. Reddington also put books that had been marketed to look like Meyer's Twilight novels through the system, and novels by Charlaine Harris which inspired the popular True Blood TV series.
Reddington said that diagrammatically Twilight had one constant tone and style throughout. While Pratchett's novel was very different, and Rice's also differed from Meyer's, although not quite as much, Harris's books were found to have "amazingly similar style". "It's no surprise they were pulled out to become famous on the big and little screen", Reddington concluded.
He added that the novels which were styled to look like the Meyer series actually had a style closer to Rice's books, according to the system. This may explain why they didn't have the same level of success today.
However, Reddington stressed that just because the style of the novels were alike, this didn't mean they had the same plot.
Reddington became involved in the study after leading collaborative writing groups in schools and wanting to monitor if the pupils were writing in a similar style to publish an ebook in a week.
The group have extended their study to films and TV programmes, with Murtagh being able to correlate scripts of CSI: Miami with the moment when advertisement breaks take place.
The system is useful for both writers and readers. Currently, Reddington and his team are using it with a literary agency to help aspiring writers hone their style. However, when it is developed, the system could provide a recommendation service for readers.
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/314e93ff/sc/21/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Ctwilight0C10A3135970CScientists0Ecan0Etell0Ewhich0Evampire0Ebooks0Ewill0Ehave0Ethe0ETwilight0Eeffect0Bhtml/story01.htm
