Detecting Narrativity Across Long Time Scales

Storytelling is a universal human practice that serves as a key site of education, collective memory, fostering social belief systems, and furthering human creativity. It can occur in different discursive domains for different social purposes with differing degrees of intensity. In this project, we develop computational methods for measuring the degree of narrativity in over 335,000 text passages distributed across twoto three-hundred years of history and four separate discursive domains (fiction, non-fiction, science, and poetry). We show how these domains are strongly differentiated according to their degree of narrative communication and, second, how truth-based discourse has declined considerably in its utilization of narrative communication. These findings suggest that there has been a long-term historical differentiation between the practices of knowing and telling, which raises important questions with respect to the social acceptance of both science and the arts.

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