Narrative as a Dynamical System

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that narratives can be modeled as dynamical systems governed by an action principle, using averaged data from multiple stories to identify the underlying path structure.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to modeling narratives as dynamical systems and constructs average paths consistent with an action principle from multiple examples.

Findings

Average narrative paths align with an action principle

Method for constructing dynamical models of narratives

Evidence supporting narrative as a physical system

Abstract

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.