Publications / Beyond Plot
Beyond Plot: How Sentiment Analysis Reshapes Our Understanding of Narrative Structure
Journal of Cultural Analytics, 2025.
Bibliographic record
- Author
- Katherine Elkins
- Title
- Beyond Plot: How Sentiment Analysis Reshapes Our Understanding of Narrative Structure
- Journal
- Journal of Cultural Analytics
- Year
- 2025
- DOI
- 10.22148/001c.143671
- Access
- Open access
- Last updated
- 14 July 2026
Summary
“Beyond Plot” synthesizes the methodological argument that runs through this research: emotional structure can reveal narrative organization that is not reducible to plot or character. Where plot analysis tracks events and character analysis tracks agents, the emotional trajectory tracks something else, the shape of the reading experience over narrative time, and that shape can carry structure the other two miss.
The article introduced middle reading in its mature form and asked whether sentiment methods survive nonlinear narrative, a question computational literary studies still benchmarks against. It argues that a narrative with little conventional plot can still exhibit a strong emotional architecture, and that the architecture is not a byproduct of the events but a structure in its own right.
The claim is deliberately bounded. Sentiment analysis is not proposed as a replacement for plot or character analysis, and a trajectory is not self-interpreting. The argument is that emotional structure is a third axis of narrative organization, measurable at the scale of the whole work, and that reading it requires returning each peak and valley to the passage that produced it.
What this work contributed
- Stated the methodological case that emotional structure is a distinct axis of narrative organization, not a shadow of plot or character.
- Tested whether sentiment methods survive nonlinear narrative, and set a question the field continues to benchmark against.
- Consolidated middle reading as the interpretive discipline that a computational trajectory requires.
Relationship to earlier and later work
It states directly the argument developed at length in The Shapes of Stories (2022) and first tested in the 2019 study of a nonlinear novel, Can Sentiment Analysis Reveal Structure in a “Plotless” Novel?
The method it defends is what In Search of a Translator (2024) and The Shapes of Cinderella (2025) carry across languages and cultures. See Computational Narrative, Translation, and Cultural Transmission and Scholarly Reception.
How to cite
Chicago
Elkins, Katherine. “Beyond Plot: How Sentiment Analysis Reshapes Our Understanding of Narrative Structure.” Journal of Cultural Analytics (2025). https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.143671.
MLA
Elkins, Katherine. “Beyond Plot: How Sentiment Analysis Reshapes Our Understanding of Narrative Structure.” Journal of Cultural Analytics, 2025, doi:10.22148/001c.143671.
APA
Elkins, K. (2025). Beyond plot: How sentiment analysis reshapes our understanding of narrative structure. Journal of Cultural Analytics. https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.143671
BibTeX
@article{elkins2025beyondplot,
author = {Elkins, Katherine},
title = {Beyond Plot: How Sentiment Analysis Reshapes Our Understanding of Narrative Structure},
journal = {Journal of Cultural Analytics},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.22148/001c.143671}
}