Operationalizing Narrative Entropy (Sn): A Two-Scene Registered Pilot Report and Pre-Validation Protocol

arXiv:2608.18109v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Narrative Entropy (S_n) is a proposed quantitative descriptor within the Bulut Doctrine, intended to capture the rate at which a narrative text imposes processing load on a reader. To date the construct has been defined theoretically but not operationalized against real texts. This report documents the first such operationalization (the v2.0 pilot): two narrative scenes -- the opening restaurant scene of Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and the opening interior-monologue block of Carver's Cathedral -- were coded manually by a single rater and scored with the candidate formula S_n = I_f imes C_b imes t. The result was a divergence from the author's naive intuition: the single-voice monologue (S_n = 30.0) scored higher than the nine-character dialogue scene (S_n = 18.8). We treat this not as a result to be explained away but as the central finding, and we refuse post-hoc adjustment of the formula. Three competing interpretations are presented -- formula incompleteness, genuine high-load prose, and measurement error -- and the design that would discriminate among them is pre-registered. This v2.1 revision adds: (i) explicit acknowledgement that the divergence is consistent with the pre-existing architectural framework which privileges inferential reconstruction over surface declaration, and that what was called "contrary to expectation" in v2.0 reflected the author's anticipatory intuition rather than the methodology's own predictions; (ii) a pre-registered construct validity test for I_f, motivated by the observation that I_f values were nearly equal across the two scenes (1.71 vs 1.58) despite the headline S_n divergence. The document functions simultaneously as a pilot report (n=2) and as a pre-registration of the next-stage protocol. It does not claim that S_n has been validated.

Source: arXiv cs.CL | 2026-08-20

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