Cultural, Emotional, and Associative Traits to Determine Literary Inclination

Various cultural and emotional preferences delineate human creativity. One such set of preferences, literary inclination, impacts not only the books people choose to read but also on the way they perceive the narrative and human relationships contained within. Understanding the overall development of a plot and the evolution of relationships among different characters has significant implications for holding the reader’s attention. In this paper, we establish a computational means to derive progressions and associations among characters in a given narrative. We use two books from different cultural traditions (American popular literature and Indian Marathi literature) to validate this technique. For purposes of measuring relationships progression between different characters, we propose the Graphical Association Method (GAM). Further analysis of changes in these imaginary social relationships in relation to a reader’s literary inclinations demonstrates that this method holds promise for a more general analysis of narrative structure.