6 degrees of separation in Icelandic Sagas- Applications of graph theory to literature
Topic: 6 degrees of separation
Resource: https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2013.00704.x
“Viking sagas: Six degrees of Icelandic separation”
The paper linked above generates networks and calculates parameters such as mean path length and clustering coefficients for Icelandic sagas- extremely developed and detailed stories from the early 9th-11th centuries describing early Icelandic life. Networks were created for the web of characters and their relationships in a number of different Icelandic sagas to try to compare the character networks with current knowledge of real-life social networks and with other epics from literature including the Iliad and Beowulf. When the data for the 18 sagas were combined, the network showed a significant giant component (98.6% of nodes) and a mean path length of 5.5, which evokes the concept of “six degrees of separation”.
I think it’s very interesting that network analysis can be applied to the field of literature, where identifying character interactions and links can help to assess the accuracy of written accounts or elucidating common trends between types of writing. For example, the sagas had different network behavior compared to Marvel comic books or The Lord of the Rings novels, where the latter fantasy genres display “over-connectedness” between characters not seen in real life. Although the sagas analyzed in this paper have unknown authors and the validity of the accounts is questionable, the fact that the analysis results show similarity to current societal networks in terms of degrees of separation is surprising and shows a prevailing characteristic of historical social networks over time. The paper shows the beneficial applications of network analysis to literature, which can help to quantify characteristics distinguishing authors, genres, time periods, and many more factors.