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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18109 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18109/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 0 of its 2 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2026.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Inter-Rater Reliability of LLM and Rule-Based Annotation for Inferential Narrative Features: Three Studies on a Turkish Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13936/) (2026)
- [Summarization Bias: The Directional Collapse of Objective Projection into Told-Mode Labels in Large Language Models --- A Conceptual Framework and Registered Test Protocol](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20712/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Narrative Entropy (Sn) 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 Sn = If × Cb × t. The result was a divergence from the author's naive intuition: the single-voice monologue (Sn = 30.0) scored higher than the nine-character dialogue scene (Sn = 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 If, motivated by the observation that If values were nearly equal across the two scenes (1.71 vs 1.58) despite the headline Sn 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 Sn has been validated.