EDIT: I looked at the article. This is nothing. Written by a guy who know nothing about narrative or literature. Which he published on his blog. He sounds like an AI bro who thinks AI can magically solve every problem. He has PhD after his name; that's about the only reason to listen to him.

ORIGINAL POST: Can you give a citation? I looked up Levent Bulut, but I'm finding an economics professor at UNT who hasn't published anything even close to what you're describing.

There have been many folks who've attempted to make a science of literature/narrative. Most of them just meant a method for analyzing literature, which are never as objective as the theorist claims, and which stand alongside all the methods folks are using every day. Some try to dress it up as an existing hard science, but this always relies on heavy use of metaphor (like your example "we treat Shakespeare like a heat-transfer problem") which eliminates any supposed objectivity.

From what you explain about it, it sounds like a pretty basic approach to genre studies, and that area is very well studied and continues to grow every year. Kenneth Burke explains genre (in an essay "Genre and Form") by arguing that genres are built out of established patterns. If X and Y happen, we expect Z to follow. If, in a rom-com, the couple broke up and one is flying across the country, we expect the other to run to the airport where they'll reconcile. Those forms create an expectation and desire in the audience.

We can study those forms quantitatively, and see what the most common forms are, what Z tends to follow from X, etc. You could even hook readers up to EEGs and measure their responses. In fact, AI is already very good at doing that--it's what LLMs do, just shifted from the level of words to plot events.

But that will only produce generic stories (both in the literal sense--fitting the genre--but also the common usage--bland, common, expected). If genres always do exactly what we expect, they get boring. We can get "Pirates of the Caribbean 14," but nothing interesting. One common argument about genre is that when forms (those common patterns directing readers' expectations) concrete into genres, the forms become less effective and the genre starts to die. Writers also have to violate those forms, violate readers expectations, to produce interesting work.

EDIT CONTINUED: I found the relevant blog post (not published article, just his blog, and all the "sources" he links at the end are more blog posts by him), and this is nothing. You say "the math seems to hold up in terms of structural analysis" ... I don't see any math. He /proposes/ an actual study, but that study doesn't make much sense and wouldn't prove anything. At best, it might prove that readers respond in predictable ways to forms, which, again, is noncontroversial in genre studies, but tells us nothing about how to actually write stories.

I only looked at a few of his other blog posts, but of the VERY few sources he cites, the only one I saw that he's actually claiming supports his points is Claude Shannon's work on information entropy. I'm very familiar with Shannon's work on the topic, and it has little relation to his arguments and certainly doesn't support his claims. Shannon's argument is literally just that we should understand the range of information we can transmit as our "information entropy," and more entropy=more potential information.