Capturing the Evolution of Characters in Novels
Andreea Macovei · 2017
The time track model considers a natural order of events that the reader seems to perceive once he continues to read or, at the end of the book despite timelines (the representation of all the events chronologically exposed in a story) and storylines (the main story or plot of a literary text). The identification of this order of events using the model of time tracks may lead to a better understanding of the entire story. This paper describes a temporal annotation scheme that can be used in order to reorder the events or more precisely, the sequences of events in novels. This methodology emphasizes temporal switches that may occur in literary texts such as flashbacks, flashforwards, embedded fabulae, temporal ruptures, and transitions. Further, this scheme can represent a starting point of a natural processing language tool in the field of temporality and temporal annotation, needed to capture the actions of a character and his or her chronological evolution (time track) throughout a book.