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Complex Networks VII pp 257–265Cite as

Network Science and Narratives: Basic Model and Application to Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables

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Part of the book series: Studies in Computational Intelligence ((SCI,volume 644))

Abstract

Propelled by the recent advances in digitization of books and computational methods for automated text analysis, we are witnessing a promising opportunity for a serious scientific study of narratives. The importance of such an endeavor stems from the fact that a good story, albeit often fictional and artificial, is composed of highly believable characters who interact and experience a sequence of events together in a realistic world setting, and thus a better understanding of narratives may yield new insights for comprehending various real social phenomena as well as literary fiction. Here we present the basic scientific framework for modeling narrative as complex networks, which allows us to study how the narrative structure is reflected in the network of characters and how they allow us to understand the dynamics of narrative progression. This paper contains the fundamental network model of narratives and its properties that serves as the starting point for a more comprehensive future work.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Although our network appears denser than typical social networks [19, 20], this is likely due to the fact that most characters of the novel are involved in some common plot while the rest of the story world is pushed into the background.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Kyungyeon Moon, Wonjae Lee, and Bong Gwan Jun for helpful comments. This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-20100004910 and NRF-2013S1A3A2055285), BK21 Plus Postgraduate Organization for Content Science, and the Digital Contents Research and Development program of MSIP (R0184-15-1037, Development of Data Mining Core Technologies for Real-time Intelligent Information Recommendation in Smart Spaces).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Culture Technology, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, Daejeon, 34141, Republic of Korea

    Semi Min & Juyong Park

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  1. Semi Min
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  2. Juyong Park
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Correspondence to Juyong Park .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. LE2I , UFR Sciences et Techniques, Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France

    Hocine Cherifi

  2. New York University, Center for Data Science, New York, USA

    Bruno Gonçalves

  3. BioComplex Laboratory, Computer Sciences, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, FL, Florida, USA

    Ronaldo Menezes

  4. 111 Dana, Physics Department, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Roberta Sinatra

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Min, S., Park, J. (2016). Network Science and Narratives: Basic Model and Application to Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. In: Cherifi, H., Gonçalves, B., Menezes, R., Sinatra, R. (eds) Complex Networks VII. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 644. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30569-1_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30569-1_19

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-30569-1

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