Theme Ontology

Contains 2,990 well-defined literary themes arranged in a hierarchy, annotated across 4,336 stories.

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The themes are arranged in a hierarchy: a tree-like graph, a directed acyclic graph, a taxonomy, but with extra features that make it an ontology. Each theme definition establishes the necessary and sufficient conditions for when that theme is present in a story.

Every story-theme association is weighted as minor, major, or choice, and comes with an explanation, the motivation, describing how the theme manifests in that story.

  • ~21 words per theme definition
  • ~13 themes per annotated story
  • ~17 words per motivation
  • longest 10% of motivations: 30+ words

The underlying data is open and maintained on GitHub. A Python package totolo or an R package stoRy can download and analyse it.