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Social syuzhet study

Crowdsourced analysis of fabula and syuzhet in popular books
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Definitions: [link], or TL;DR: Fabula is the linear timeline of events in the story's universe. Syuzhet is the not necessarily linear timeline of events presented to the reader. The movie Memento is a great example of disconnected fabula and syuzhet used to great effect.

For the purpose of studying the use of syuzhet in human-written novels for application to fiction generation, I would like to be able to have graphs (like the one in the Wikipedia article) of fabula as a function of syuzhet or vice versa for a great many well-known novels. However, I imagine it would be very tedious to do this (reading very slowly while taking copious notes about what moments in the story's timeline are described on which pages), so I propose to do it by crowdsourcing.

Imagine an ebook reader app where everyone reading a given book has access to shared fabula and syuzhet timelines, and can easily make a note of a correlation between the two at any point while they're reading the book. The timelines show points other readers have already connected, so each reader can do just a few to fill in a few gaps and confirm existing connections. That means each reader only has to do a few per book, so it's not onerous.

How to convince the readers to do this? Give them credit toward future book purchases for each connection they make that's corroborated by other readers.

notexactly, Nov 09 2015

Fabula and Syuzhet https://en.wikipedi.../Fabula_and_syuzhet
I forgot to actually add this link until long after I posted the idea :/ [notexactly, Nov 09 2015]

crepes suzette https://en.wikipedi.../Cr%C3%AApe_Suzette
Yum and French [popbottle, Nov 12 2015]


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Annotation:







       Cheers for the explanation. I like the idea for the possibility of finding depictions of contemporaneous time across disparate works, no matter how jumbled. Patterns in the jumbles might just reveal first causes too...
4and20, Nov 09 2015
  

       A Clockwork Orange ? Or do you mean something like a record album, where the track order tells a meta story.
FlyingToaster, Nov 09 2015
  

       ooh, new words. (+)   

       I think your forgetting movies are getting dumber, meaning any novels are getting equally pointless and unimaginative.
travbm, Nov 09 2015
  

       [travbm], how could you possibly know that without having done a survey such as the one I suggest?
notexactly, Nov 10 2015
  

       "Jane had lunch. Dick waited all day". How would you graph that? Dick's day starts before Jane's lunch and finishes after it.   

       Also, what would you do about pluperfects?   

       And are you after a Cartesian Diagram type of graph, or a Koenigsburg Bridges type of graph?
pertinax, Nov 11 2015
  

       'Course we could always use a Moëbius graph.   

       Consider cliodynamics, Big History, and the idea of eternal/historical recurrence. History repeats itself, and linear time (fabula) turns out to be a big circle...but how (syuzhet)?!   

       The Möebius diagram could help.   

       (+)
Sgt Teacup, Nov 11 2015
  

       // cliodynamics //   

       New word for me this time. Also cliometrics. Interesting stuff!
notexactly, Nov 13 2015
  


 

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