Open AccessClustering of Novels Represented as Social Networks
Author(s) -
Mariona Coll Ardanuy,
Caroline Sporleder
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
linguistic issues in language technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1945-3590
pISSN - 1945-3604
DOI - 10.33011/lilt.v12i.1379
Subject(s) - premise , character (mathematics) , narrative , computer science , cluster analysis , representation (politics) , literary criticism , field (mathematics) , genre analysis , feature (linguistics) , artificial intelligence , literature , natural language processing , linguistics , art , philosophy , mathematics , political science , geometry , politics , pure mathematics , law
Within the field of literary analysis, there are few branches as confusing as that of genre theory. Literary criticism has failed so far to reach a consensus on what makes a genre a genre. In this paper, we examine the degree to which the character structure of a novel is indicative of the genre it belongs to. With the premise that novels are societies in miniature, we build static and dynamic social networks of characters as a strategy to represent the narrative structure of novels in a quantifiable manner. For each of the novels, we compute a vector of literary-motivated features extracted from their network representation. We perform clustering on the vectors and analyze the resulting clusters in terms of genre and authorship.