Phil Feldman

Although the idea of Digital Humanities, or the quantitative analysis of the arts, is starting to make its presence felt in the last half of the 2010s, The Clockwork Muse predates all this by decades. Martindale was doing computational analysis of poetry, prose, visual arts, architecture, and even scientific writing in the 1980s! The central premise of this book is that human creative output is driven by what he calls The Law of Novelty, which consist of two components: 1) Arousal potential 2) Habituation, or exposure fatigue His main premise is that to be successful, arousal potential must increase over time, and at a rate that the audience desires. Too little, and the audience will become fatigued and find novelty elsewhere. Too fast and the audience won’t comprehend. Artists that produce novelty at the right rate for their communities are the most successful. At the same time, artists behave according to the principle of least effort, and will take the easiest path to increasing arousal potential. How art is created for human audiences is by varying the ratio of two approaches: Primordial content: This represents a “going back to basics” approach to art. Forms become simpler and less refined. Increases in primordial content typically occur at the beginning of a movement. Consider impressionism, where art went from highly refined representation to vaguer representations that incorporated a larger interpretive and emotional component. Stylistic change: This is the process that we see within an artistic movement, where the process is incrementally refined by the artists in the movement. A syntax is developed, and a progressively more sophisticated “conversation” emerges. The contribution of these two approaches in art movements, careers, and even within sequential art such as novels and music vary inversely to one another in roughly sinusoidal patterns. While each value may decrease individually, the combination of the two increases. Martindale then goes on to show that this theory holds in a multitude of contexts and studies. There are two general forms of the studies. In his text analytics, he analyzes variability/incongruity, and groups terms into “Primordial”/”Stylistic” buckets and then does statistical analysis on the results, generally finding good correlations. For the study of visual arts ranging from painting to architecture, he collects canonical images across a given timeframe (often in centuries), divides this span into segments, randomises the segments, and has subjects classify the images across multiple dimensions which in turn can be collapsed into the primordial/stylistic overarching categories.