The structure of narrative: The case of film scripts

Authors:
Fionn Murtagh;Adam Ganz;Stewart McKie
Affiliations:
Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham TW20 0EX, England;Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham TW20 0EX, England;Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham TW20 0EX, England
Venue:
Pattern Recognition
Year:
2009

Citing 7
Cited 5

Structure of hierarchic clusterings: implications for information retrieval and for multivariate data analysis

Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse

Computational Linguistics
Advances in domain independent linear text segmentation

NAACL 2000 Proceedings of the 1st North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics conference
Multi-paragraph segmentation of expository text

ACL '94 Proceedings of the 32nd annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
From Linear Story Generation to Branching Story Graphs

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
The Motion Picture Industry: Critical Issues in Practice, Current Research, and New Research Directions

Marketing Science
From Story Line to Box Office: A New Approach for Green-Lighting Movie Scripts

Management Science

Multiple correspondence analysis for "tall" data sets

Intelligent Data Analysis
A new contiguity-constrained agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm for image segmentation

CAEPIA'09 Proceedings of the Current topics in artificial intelligence, and 13th conference on Spanish association for artificial intelligence
Level-of-detail stories as a virtual museum of a movie

ICIDS'10 Proceedings of the Third joint conference on Interactive digital storytelling
Tag clouds for displaying semantics: the case of filmscripts

Information Visualization
Measuring synchrony in dialog transcripts

COST'11 Proceedings of the 2011 international conference on Cognitive Behavioural Systems

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.01

Visualization

Abstract

We analyze the style and structure of story narrative using the case of film scripts. The practical importance of this is noted, especially the need to have support tools for television movie writing. We use the Casablanca film script, and scripts from six episodes of CSI (Crime Scene Investigation). For analysis of style and structure, we quantify various central perspectives discussed in McKee's book, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. Film scripts offer a useful point of departure for exploration of the analysis of more general narratives. Our methodology, using Correspondence Analysis and hierarchical clustering, is innovative in a range of areas that we discuss. In particular this work is groundbreaking in taking the qualitative analysis of McKee and grounding this analysis in a quantitative and algorithmic framework.