Have you network’d tonight, Desdemona?

Using Network Science to Analyze Scripts

Why Not Just Read the Script?● One picture is worth 1,000 words (use network as a

navigational chart)a. Othello (W.Shakespeare): 28,000 wordsb. War and Peace (L.Tolstoy): 587,000 wordsc. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (M.Proust): 1,267,000 words

● The script may be in Chinese, Arabic or Russian--and you still want to know who is the main character...

● ...which may not be clear even if the script is in English! (Hint: it’s Iago!)

Use social network analysis (SNA).

Not Invented HereT.Eliassi-Rad and M.Gupte, “Measuring Tie Strength in Implicit Social Networks,” Proceedings of the 4th ACM International Conference on Web Science (WebSci'12), Evanston, IL, June 2012.

Co-OccurrenceTwo characters are connected if they occur in the same scene. Co-occurrences can be traced by hand (for Othello) or using a computer program.

1. Get a good electronic source, ideally with character names and act/scene boundaries properly designated; say, this

2. Write a computer program to extract the information

Python Code Sample# Import all required modulesimport bs4 as bs, re, urllib.request, networkx as nxfrom networkx.algorithms import bipartite

# Use this free and well-structured electronic textURL = 'http://shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/full.html'

# Download the text and "cook" a "soup"soup = bs.BeautifulSoup(urllib.request.urlopen(URL), 'html5lib') ….

Save the Network into a File & Load into Gephi● Gephi is a “Microsoft Draw” for SNA.● Can be used to create networks by hand, but much more

efficient for processing previously constructed networks.● Display the network, but also calculate centralities--

they may tell us what the story is about

Note to self: ask RC if have more time, and switch to Gephi if affirmative

Hope It Worked!

How about War & Peace?

Take Home MessageDigital Humanities = Digital + Humanities

Take both!