Narrative as a Dynamical System
This work addresses the challenge of applying physics-based dynamical systems to human narrative analysis, which is incremental as it builds on existing evidence.
The paper tackled the problem of modeling narrative evolution as a dynamical system by constructing three average paths from about 500 narratives, showing that the average path is consistent with an action principle.
There is increasing evidence that human activity in general, and narrative in particular, can be treated as a dynamical system in the physics sense; a system whose evolution is described by an action integral, such that the average of all possible paths from point A to point B is given by the extremum of the action. We create by construction three such paths by averaging about 500 different narratives, and we show that the average path is consistent with an action principle.