Computational Prediction of Elapsed Narrative Time

It is commonly asserted that the average amount of narrative time that elapses in a passage of fiction has decreased over the past several hundred years. But did this change in literary time really occur, and if so, how rapidly? Previous work on a small but carefully chosen set of hand-labeled passages finds that literary time becomes progressively shorter over the 19th and early 20th centuries. We explore computational methods for predicting literary time and apply these to a collection of more than 53,000 complete novels from the 1700s to the present day. We observe the same decrease in average narrative time up to the mid-20th century. After establishing this result we compare metrics of estimated literary time to patterns of language use.