I’ve been meaning to blog on the video circulating of Kurt Vonnegut talking about the Shape of Stories. He describes the curves followed by popular stories like “boy meets girl” and suggests computers could even understand such simple curves. In Lapham’s Quarterly you can read the text of this lecture with illustrations. See Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard. In this version he asks about the value of such systems, a question which could apply equally to computer generated visualization,
The question is, does this system I’ve devised help us in the evaluation of literature? Perhaps a real masterpiece cannot be crucified on a cross of this design. How about Hamlet?
He concludes that the system doesn’t work because the truth is ambiguous. We simply don’t know in complex works (like Hamlet) if news is good or bad. Good literature is open to interpretation.
But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.
Many have noticed this amusing play on visualization including an infographic on Visua.ly, Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories:
