Visualising character networks in literature to enable new interpretative practices

What is it about?

We apply natural language processing to English novels in order to track the occurrences of characters. Two different networks are created through this process: a) a dynamic network of the flow of character co-occurrence; b) a static network of overall character co-occurrence. We performed user studies with humanities scholars and students and report about the findings that indicate the potential for a new collaborative interpretative practice.

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Why is it important?

Distant reading is about macroscopic analysis of large corpora of texts. Our approach allows to quantify such large corpora relying on methods from network science and information theory, but also enables the user at any time to close read particular parts of the analysed works.