Sapping Attention:

It’s interesting to look, as I did at my last post, at the plot structure of typical episodes of a TV show as derived through topic models. But while it may help in understanding individual TV shows, the method also shows some promise on a more ambitious goal: understanding the general structural elements that most TV shows and movies draw from. TV and movies scripts are carefully crafted structures: I wrote earlier about how the Simpsons moves away from the school after its first few minutes, for example, and with this larger corpus even individual words frequently show a strong bias towards the front or end of scripts. These crafting shows up in the ways language is distributed through them in time.

So that’s what I’m going to do here: make some general observations about the ways that scripts shift thematically. In its own, this stuff is pretty interesting–when I first started analyzing the set, I thought it might an end in itself. But it turns out that by combining those thematic scripts with the topic models, it’s possible to do something I find really fascinating, and a little mysterious: you can sketch out, derived from the tens of thousands of hours of dialogue in the corpus, what you could literally call a plot “arc” through multidimensional space.