Topology analysis of social networks extracted from literature.

• Main Authors: Michaël C Waumans, Thibaut Nicodème, Hugues Bersini
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2015-01-01
• Series: PLoS ONE
• Online Access: http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC4454535?pdf=render

In a world where complex networks are an increasingly important part of science, it is interesting to question how the new reading of social realities they provide applies to our cultural background and in particular, popular culture. Are authors of successful novels able to reproduce social networks faithful to the ones found in reality? Is there any common trend connecting an author's oeuvre, or a genre of fiction? Such an analysis could provide new insight on how we, as a culture, perceive human interactions and consume media. The purpose of the work presented in this paper is to define the signature of a novel's story based on the topological analysis of its social network of characters. For this purpose, an automated tool was built that analyses the dialogs in novels, identifies characters and computes their relationships in a time-dependent manner in order to assess the network's evolution over the course of the story.