To Better Understand Vincent : A Study of The Emotional Tone of Vincent Van Gogh's Letters to His Brother Theo: 1872-1890
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The artist Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) kept up an energetic correspondence with his brother Theo between 1872 and 1890.Theo supported Vincent financially and enabled his pursuance of art.The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has English translations of 645 letters written by Vincent to Theo available on their website.To better understand the artist, this research examines the emotional tone (Pleasantness, Activation) of these letters and fluctuations in tone over time, using the Dictionary of Affect sentiment analysis tool.Three distinct "chapters" of letter-writing (Before Art, Studying Art, Artist) are defined, based on the frequency of letters and breaks in letter-writing.Surprisingly, the overall emotional tone of the letters is positive.The hypothesis of decreasing overall pleasantness across time is supported by a regression analysis.Specifically, the trajectory of pleasantness in the letters has a tragic form: it falls to a low in the mid-1880s and then rises briefly before the artist's death.The second chapter of Vincent's life (1880-1886) is the most turbulent and includes a distinctive vocabulary reflecting Vincent's preoccupations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".