Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

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1. benjismithDec 2020
   YES! These are pretty much exactly the methods I used when I developed my project http://prosecraft.io

   You can see the emotional story arc -- the shapes of the stories -- for more than 16,000 books.

   I train a Word2Vec model on the vocabulary of all those books (almost 1.5 billion words) and then I use a clustering algorithm to score all those words on a sentiment scale of 1 to 10 (where 1 is the most negative and 10 is the most positive). Then I break the books into 50 equal-sized chunks and aggregate the positive and negative scores for each chunk.

   You can click on any of the chart segments to see a word cloud of all the words that contributed to the positive and negative sentiment of that chunk. You can really see the ups and downs of the stories, as the protagonists struggle to overcome their obstacles, when you look at those charts!

   Here are a few of my favorite example books to show people:

   The Hobbit

   http://prosecraft.io/library/j-r-r-tolkien/the-hobbit/

   Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

   http://prosecraft.io/library/j-k-rowling/harry-potter-and-th...

   Animal Farm

   http://prosecraft.io/library/george-orwell/animal-farm/

   I first encountered this method not through Vonnegut but through the "Hedonometer" project, at the University of Vermont Computational Story Lab. They use this technique on the twitter firehose, to measure the overall emotional arc of the world, as expressed in social media.

   https://hedonometer.org/timeseries/en_all/

   There's an excellent episode of the podcast Lexicon Valley where they discuss the hedonometer project, with the researchers at UVM who developed it...

   http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2015/0...

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2. 101008Dec 2020
   Two finales:

   - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. When the seventh book came out in 2007 there was this fear among the fandom that JK Rowling couldn't deliver a great ending. I think most people agreed she did very well (even more than expected, considering the complexity of the story in the prior six books).

   - Breaking Bad last season / last episode: there aren't many tv shows that can end in a high note (check Game of Thrones, for example). I think Breaking Bad - and in general, what separates the best tv shows from great tv shows - is that they are able to have a good ending.

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3. 101008Aug 2024
   I always liked that idea (not original, I know) in the Harry Potter books (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, more specifically), where two people ask a private question they should only know to be sure they are not being impersonated.
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4. tobinfekkesAug 2024
   Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Midnight release, read until the sun came up...and kept going? Not sure exactly how many hours, maybe 9 or 10?
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5. jongjongMay 2024
   I was never very keen of non-fiction books. The reason is because I could usually just watch it in movie format which is a lot less time-consuming.

   The last fiction book I read (over a decade ago) was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and the reason I read it is because I had watched all the previous Harry Potter films and wanted to know what happens but the movie didn't exist yet at the time. I was hooked and there was literally no other option. I'm sure this effect worked very well in J.K. Rowling's favor.

   Some people claim that they prefer fiction in book format because they can fill in the gaps and imagine the worlds and characters however they like... But personally, I prefer getting as much information as possible; visual information is part of it. If I had to choose between watching a film in color or black-and-white, I'd choose color for the same reason... With black and white, I could let my mind wander and assume that the person's clothing is made of gold yarn but I'd rather not as it mostly distracts from the story and those aren't details that interest me.

   When I consume fiction, I'm looking for narratives, external perspectives, messages, lessons, principles and insights in a format that is as objective as possible. In book format, there's too much that comes from me, I end up projecting my pre-existing biases into the story and it doesn't feel as satisfying or mind-expanding.

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6. theaussiestewFeb 2024
   I'm reminded of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Choosing the Resurrection Stone only leads to pain.
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