Imaginary worlds like Star Wars and Game of Thrones dominate global culture. Are they really a recent phenomenon, or have they always been central to storytelling? In our latest paper, we investigate the historical trajectory of imaginary worlds with new large-scale data. - ThreadSky

edgardubourg.bsky.social • 24 days ago

Imaginary worlds like Star Wars and Game of Thrones dominate global culture. Are they really a recent phenomenon, or have they always been central to storytelling? In our latest paper, we investigate the historical trajectory of imaginary worlds with new large-scale data.

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edhagen.net•23 days ago

🧪

gzidar.bsky.social•23 days ago

I give you... Religion. 😃

schichmax.bsky.social•23 days ago

Hey, this looks cool. Is there a paper with the figures you show, beyond the annotation pipeline paper cited below?

edgardubourg.bsky.social•23 days ago

Thanks! Yes: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04877-x

schichmax.bsky.social•23 days ago

Super! Looking forward to read that. :)

edgardubourg.bsky.social•24 days ago

We started by asking two simple questions. First, has the proportion of fictions set in imaginary worlds increased over time? Second, have these worlds become more novel and detailed? To answer these, we needed methods able to scale to tens of thousands of works.

edgardubourg.bsky.social•24 days ago

For Study 1, we collected two huge datasets. One of 51,169 novels from Wikidata and Wikipedia, covering 700 BCE to 2015. One of 50,928 movies from IMDb , covering the whole history of cinema. We then classified which works featured imaginary worlds.

edgardubourg.bsky.social•24 days ago

For classification, we used speculative genres like fantasy and science fiction as proxies. For movies, we added a machine learning model based on plot keywords to better capture cases where genre labels were missing or imprecise.

edgardubourg.bsky.social•24 days ago

The results were striking. The proportion of novels set in imaginary worlds rose from under 10% before the Industrial Revolution to over 30% today. In movies, the proportion doubled during the 20th century. The rise is real and robust across methods.

edgardubourg.bsky.social•24 days ago

But was it only about quantity? We also wanted to know if imaginary worlds became richer, more detailed, more central to the narratives.

edgardubourg.bsky.social•24 days ago

For that, we developed an automatic annotation method based on large language models, capable of scoring how much a work builds a novel world. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10.3389/frai.2024.1365508/full

mariusmercier.bsky.social•24 days ago

Congrats Edgar !!

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