Control charts are typically used to evaluate the performance of some process over time. However, they can also be effectively used to indicate changes of mood in a short story.

This project demonstrates the use of control charts in analyzing short stories, using as an example Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

The text of the story was lifted from Project Gutenberg. The body of the story was initially processed manually using a simple text editor (Vim). Then, the individual paragraphs were analyzed using Excel. Finally, the control charts themselves were built using Python, Pandas, and Matplotlib.

The raw story can be found here.

The Excel breakdown can be found here.

The Jupyter notebook showing the creation of the actual control charts can be found here.

A final PowerPoint presentation of the control chart can be found here.