Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autore principale: Qiu, Lilin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10865
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866917139109117952
author Qiu, Lilin
author_facet Qiu, Lilin
contents This study analyzes the emotional tone of dialogue in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) using computational text analysis. Dialogue was extracted with regular expressions, then preprocessed, and scored using the NRC-VAD lexicon to quantify emotional dimensions. The results show that the dialogue maintains a generally positive (high valence) and calm (low arousal) tone, with a gradually increasing sense of agency (dominance) as the story progresses. These patterns reflect the novel's emotional rhythm: moments of danger and excitement are regularly balanced by humor, camaraderie, and relief. Visualizations -- including emotional trajectory graphs and word clouds -- highlight how Tolkien's language cycles between tension and comfort. By combining computational tools with literary interpretation, this study demonstrates how digital methods can uncover subtle emotional structures in literature, revealing the steady rhythm and emotional modulation that shape the storytelling in The Hobbit.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_10865
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Quantifying Emotional Tone in Tolkien's The Hobbit: Dialogue Sentiment Analysis with RegEx, NRC-VAD, and Python
Qiu, Lilin
Computation and Language
This study analyzes the emotional tone of dialogue in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) using computational text analysis. Dialogue was extracted with regular expressions, then preprocessed, and scored using the NRC-VAD lexicon to quantify emotional dimensions. The results show that the dialogue maintains a generally positive (high valence) and calm (low arousal) tone, with a gradually increasing sense of agency (dominance) as the story progresses. These patterns reflect the novel's emotional rhythm: moments of danger and excitement are regularly balanced by humor, camaraderie, and relief. Visualizations -- including emotional trajectory graphs and word clouds -- highlight how Tolkien's language cycles between tension and comfort. By combining computational tools with literary interpretation, this study demonstrates how digital methods can uncover subtle emotional structures in literature, revealing the steady rhythm and emotional modulation that shape the storytelling in The Hobbit.
title Quantifying Emotional Tone in Tolkien's The Hobbit: Dialogue Sentiment Analysis with RegEx, NRC-VAD, and Python
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10865