Structural Analysis on Social Network Constructed from Characters in Literature Texts

Abstract

Recently we witnessed that the social network analysis focusing on social entities is applied in the social science and web-science, behavioral sciences, as well as in economics, marketing. In this paper we present one method to construct and structure analysis the social network from literary fictions by a simple lexical analysis. And we will show that those literary social graphs, shows the power law distribution of some features, which is the typical characteristics of complex systems. We newly proposed the concept of the kernel of literary social network by which we can classify the abstract level of protagonists appeared in fictions. And we also studied the connectivity of social network based on statement distance distribution of characters. Our study shows that the metric distance among characters written in linear text is very similar to the intrinsic and semantic relationship described by fiction writers, which implies the proposed social network from fictions could be another representation of literary fiction. So we can apply other scientific and quantitative approach by analyzing the concrete social graph model extracted from textual data.