Social Networks in Literature
journal article: http://musicweb.ucsd.edu/~sdubnov/Mu270d/AIIDE12/03/WS12-14-011.pdf
While classic literature often attempts to portray realistic social relations, strategy and foci in the story generation process vary immensely. A paper from the English & Comparative Literature Dept. at Columbia University proposes that social networks and graph theory provide a novel, complementary mechanism for narrative generation via evaluation of 19th Century British fiction – utilizing Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Henry James’ The Ambassadors. Narratives are not merely depictions of individual experience with language but artificial societies whose social form can be subject to quantification and analysis. Narrative structure is intimately related to network structure.
The Pickwick Papers (right) is referred to as a picaresque, structured around disconnected excursions across settings. The network, correspondingly, is shaped like a star with social interactions dominated by a single central hub within in a tightly knit clique and surrounded by a diffuse web of disconnected nodes. Weak ties (lighter, thin lines) dominate this social network.
Middlemarch (middle) is likewise a large network, however with a slightly more compartmentalized giant component. This social world is large but comparatively integrated. Interaction appears to be organized “oligarchically,” with strong ties (dark, thick lines) well distributed, but not on the periphery. This structure also glaringly reveals the principle of strong triadic closure, since in the core hub of social interaction, two strong ties tend to result in some third connecting tie/edge. Two friends of some character tend to be friends, or at least acquaintances, themselves.
The Ambassadors (left) provides a noticeable contrast in structure however still displays clear indications of strong triadic closure. The number of common neighbors shared by the two endpoints of an edge, i.e. the embeddedness, in this network is high. With no nodes left pathless to other nodes, this is a connected component. Conducive to rapid transmission of messages, rumors, and peer influence (path length is small), it is not surprising to hear that themes of the book include social pressure and conformity. James’ narrative approach emphasizes unity and psychological depth rather than extensive plotlines.
The journal article goes on to suggest that if literary critics benefit in understanding complex narrative structures by extracting networks from stories, perhaps narrative intelligence researchers can benefit by inverting the process – generating narratives from networks. Doing so, a computer model based around structural balance, the concept associated with the stability of a triad based on the quantity of positive and negative edges present, is run to yield “proto-narratives” and provide insight on event history, node history, and relationship-link history that comprise the framework of a narrative.