Defining the core characters and events of a fictional narrative by two-mode social network analysis
Keywords: digital literary studies, two-mode networks, duality
Abstract: Inspired by the increased availability of digitized texts and the development of relevant technologies,
as well as rise of the digital literary studies and the method of distant reading (1), social network
analysis has increasingly been used to analyze fictional narratives. The main lines of research focus on
revealing patterns within a wider corpus and modelling interaction between characters within a single
literary work (2). The present study adds to past research by analyzing two essential story elements in
parallel, the plot and the characters. Plot is a structure connecting a series of events based on their
logical relationships. Patterns of characters’ co-participation in the events allows readers to see how
characters and plot define each other thus building a co-dependent relationship between these two
elements of the story.
Data for the article is drawn from the renowned Finnish war novel The Unknown Soldiers by Väinö
Linna (3). A two-mode dataset was constructed to show how the 58 characters of the novel co-appear
in the 88 sections of the book, each of which illustrates an episode encountered by the troops. As a
depiction of war, the novel describes various forms of interaction, including multiple characters sharing
spaces and experiences together without any bilateral dialogue.
The article contributes in part to the use of core-periphery analysis as an indicator of characters’
positions. Among the methods created for identifying the core-periphery structure, and whether such
structure can be found, there are varying and often inconsistent assumptions about how the core and
the periphery are connected to each other. A binary typology distinguishes between two-block models
and k-cores (4). The former partitions a network into a binary hub-and-spoke layout while the k-core
decomposition divides the network into a layered hierarchy.
In the present article, the discussion is extended to two-mode networks and a qualitative verification
of the methods. Both the two-block model (5) and the k-core (6) are implemented for two-mode
networks. The article assesses how the selection of the core-periphery algorithm affects the ability to
reveal relevant observations about the protagonists and key events of the novel. Finally, perspectives
provided by the network measures are compared with those of past scholarship.
References
1 F. Moretti 2013 (2000). Conjectures on World Literature. Distant Reading. London & New
York: Verso, 43–62.
2 D. Chao et al. (2019). Representing stories as interdependent dynamics of character activities
and plots: A two-mode network relational event model. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
34.
3 V. Linna (2015 [1954]). The Unknown Soldiers. London: Penguin Books.
4 R. J. Gallagher et al. (2021). A clarified typology of core-periphery structure in networks. Sci.
Adv. 7.
5 S. Borgatti, M. Everett, and J. Johnson. (2018) Analyzing Social Networks. London: Sage.
6 M. Cerinšek, V. Batagelj. (2015). Generalized two-mode cores, Social Networks 42.
Submission Number: 46
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