Constructing Social Networks of Irish and British Fiction,

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1 Constructing Social Networks of Irish and British Fiction, Derek Greene School of Computer Science University College Dublin

Nation, Genre and Gender Project Research project funded by Irish Research Council in 2013. Inter-disciplinary collaboration between UCD Humanities Institute and SFI Insight Centre for Data Analytics.

2 Nation, Genre and Gender Project Research project funded by Irish Research Council in Inter-disciplinary collaboration between UCD Humanities Institute and SFI Insight Centre for Data Analytics. Involves the creation an annotated electronic corpus of Irish and English novels from the 19th and early 20th century. Corpus includes key representative and influential texts, by female and male authors, from both Ireland and England. We use methods from social network analysis to explore and visualise the texts from new perspectives. Aim to apply intersectional (gender, class, ethnicity) analysis to these networks, and engage in intensive critical analysis. 2

3 Social Network Analysis J. Moreno. "Who shall survive?: A new approach to the problem of human interrelations". Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co.,

4 Concepts in Network Analysis Network: a way of representing relations among a group of people. Consists of individuals, called nodes, where certain pairs of individuals are connected to one another by relations called edges. Two nodes are deemed to be neighbours if they are connected by an edge. Weighted network: a numeric value is associated with each edge. Edge weights usually represent strength of association or counts

5 Pen Harrington Social Network Analysis in Literature Mr. Webb Longbourne Butler Longbourne Footman The Two Elegant Ladies Who Waited On His Sisters The Miss Webbs William Goulding Netherfield Housemaid The Hackney Coachman The Gouldings Rosings Servant Four Nieces Of Mrs. Jenkinson Clarke Longbourne Housemaids Mr. Robinson Sarah Mr. Morris Miss Watson Some Of His Servants All Their Other Neighbours Mrs. Long Mrs. Nicholls Mr. Jones The Narrator The Sentinel On Guard Captain Carter Mrs. Long's Nieces Netherfield Servant Mrs. Hill Mrs. Philips Your Great Uncle The Judge The Two Harringtons The Other Officers Pemberley Gardener Chamberlayne Richard A Private Had Been Flogged Sally Mr. Philips Mrs. Forster Colonel Forster Colonel Millar The Officers General 1 Mr. Denny Haggerston The Coachman The Waiter Pratt Mr. Gardiner Two Or Three Other Gentlemen From The House Mr. Stone Kitty Bennet Lydia Bennet One Of The Officers' Wives Mary Bennet Mr. Bennet Mrs. Bennet Jane Bennet Mrs. Reynolds Elizabeth Bennet Mr. Wickham Lady Lucas Meryton Regiment Officer Mr. Bingley Mr. Darcy Miss Bingley Miss Darcy Mrs. Hurst Elder Mr. Bingley Mr. Hurst Servants With Cold Meat Two Men Servants Miss Grantley Current Pemberley Steward Lucas Sister Mrs. Annesley Your Maid Mrs. Bennet's Father John The Gardiner Servant The Incumbent Of The Living Mrs. Gardiner The Little Gardiners Mary King's Uncle The Chambermaid Mrs. Younge Mr. Collins Charlotte Lucas Elder Mr. Collins Sir William Lucas Maria Lucas Mr. Jones's Shop Boy Miss De Bourgh Lady Catherine De Bourgh Mrs. Jenkinson Colonel Fitzwilliam A Young Lucas Mary King Elder Mr. Darcy A Gentleman At My Brother Gardiner's In Town Wickham's Father Rosings Housekeeper All The Servants Lady Anne Darcy Wickham's Mother John The Collins Servant The Archbishop Lord Fitzwilliam Sir Lewis De Bourgh Lady Metcalfe The Younger Lucas Girls Miss King's Grandfather Miss Pope The Lucas Boys Hunsford Housemaid Dawson 329 pages, 61 chapters ~124,000 words Character network Pride and Prejudice (1813) 5

6 Why Social Network Analysis? Motivated by work in distant reading, the practice of understanding literature from a macro-level viewpoint. Novels do not offer empirical evidence of actual social relations, but they do offer us a rich insight into how society and community are imagined by writers and readers. The interactions between characters in novels can yield maps of textual social networks and imagined community. Analysing a corpus of fiction over an extended time period ( ) and visualising the resulting networks allows us to trace these maps of imagined communities. Reflects the arguments and hypotheses that there are distinctive features in how social relations influence and are represented in fiction. 6

Corpus Selection Process Human expertise: project management committee identified 200 potential texts, combining canonical and popular Balance of Irish and English, female and male authors, genre

7 Corpus Selection Process Human expertise: project management committee identified 200 potential texts, combining canonical and popular Balance of Irish and English, female and male authors, genre representation, across historical range. Prioritisation dictated by need to develop and test methodology, and also by availability of high-quality texts. Corpus currently consists of 51 annotated novels from 31 authors - 48% Female, 52% Male; 65% British, 35% Irish; Genres cover social criticism, romance, gothic horror, mystery, detective fiction 7

8 Novel Annotation For each novel, the text of each chapter of a novel is manually annotated to identify all characters and their aliases. Mr. Bennet was among the earliest of those who waited on Mr. Bingley. He had always intended to visit him, though to the last always assuring his wife that he should not go; and till the evening after the visit was paid, she had no knowledge of it. It was then disclosed in the following manner. Observing his second daughter employed in trimming a hat, he suddenly addressed her with, "I hope Mr. Bingley will like it Lizzy." "We are not in a way to know what Mr. Bingley likes," said her mother resentfully, "since we are not to visit." "But you forget, mama," said Elizabeth, "that we shall meet him at the assemblies, and that Mrs. Long has promised to introduce him." "I do not believe Mrs. Long will do any such thing. She has two nieces of her own. She is a selfish, hypocritical woman, and I have no opinion of her." Excerpt, Chapter 2 Pride and Prejudice (1813) 8

9 Novel Annotation The next step involves creating a character dictionary, which maps all aliases for a character to their definitive name. We replace all aliases in the original text with definitive names. Original Text Observing his second daughter employed in trimming a hat, he suddenly addressed her with, "I hope Mr. Bingley will like it Lizzy." "We are not in a way to know what Mr. Bingley likes," said her mother resentfully, "since we are not to visit." Annotated Text Observing Lizzy employed in trimming a hat, he suddenly addressed her with, "I hope Mr. Bingley will like it Lizzy." "We are not in a way to know what Mr. Bingley likes," said Mrs. Bennet resentfully, "since we are not to visit." 9

10 Character Attributes The annotator also assigns attributes to each of the characters in the character dictionary. These can denote gender, occupation, nationality, religion, status, role etc. There is no pre-defined taxonomy. Definitive Name Aliases Attributes Mr. Bennet Mr. Bingley Mrs. Bennet mr. bennet, her father mr. bingley mrs. bennet, his wife, her mother, mama lizzy, elizabeth, his second daughter mrs. long, your friend Male, English, Father, Gentleman, Husband Male, English, Father, Gentleman, Brother Female, English, Gentlewoman, Wife, Mother, Sister Mrs. Long s Nieces two nieces Collective, Female, English, Niece Kitty Bennet kitty, one of her daughters Female, English, Cousin, Daughter, Sister Excerpt, Character Dictionary Pride and Prejudice (1813) 10

11 Novel Annotation - Challenges Manual annotation by researchers familiar with a novel is required, as many subtle issues arise. Challenges include: - OCR issues; inconsistent formatting and punctuation - First person narration; multiple narrators - Mistaken identity - Deception, disguises, and hidden identity - Groups of characters; collectives - Speculative characters - In addition, validating and standardising character attributes requires human judgement. Corpus of 51 novels contains 11,665 unique characters: 52.5% male, 22.5% female, 30% collective 11

12 Character Networks Character co-occurrence: The appearance of two character definitive names in the annotated text. Observing Lizzy employed in trimming a hat, he suddenly addressed her with, "I hope Mr. Bingley will like it Lizzy." "We are not in a way to know what Mr. Bingley likes," said Mrs. Bennet resentfully, "since we are not to visit." Using the character dictionary, we identify all co-occurrences of character aliases within ~100 words of one another. By recording the cooccurrences in each chapter, we can build a character network for the chapter. Character Network Chapter 1, Pride and Prejudice 12

13 Character Networks We can either study the individual chapter networks, or merge the character networks across all chapters to create an overall character network for a novel. Character Network Chapter 1, Pride and Prejudice Overall Character Network Pride and Prejudice 13

14 Network Visualisation To visualise our character networks, we use the open source cross-platform tool Gephi ( 14

15 Network Visualisation Bill Sikes Fagin Jonathan Harker Count Dracula Nancy Oliver Twist Mina Harker Lucy Westenra Mr. Brownlow OLIVER TWIST Charles Dickens (1837) DRACULA Bram Stoker (1897) Van Helsing Sherlock Holmes Sir Henry Baskerville Dr. Watson Stephen Dedalus The Hound Mary Dedalus Cranly Simon Dedalus THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES Arthur Conan Doyle (1902) % A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN James Joyce (1916) 15

16 Character Centrality A wide range of established methods from social network analysis can also be applied to character networks. Centrality: Quantify how important or influential a node is within a social network. Various measures reflect different aspects of importance. Top 10 most central characters in Pride and Prejudice overall character network. Nodes are scaled and coloured by weighted degree. 16

17 Ego Networks Rather than analysing the overall network for a novel, we can study the social network around a specific character, referred to as the character's ego network. Ego network for "Elder Mr. Darcy" Pride and Prejudice 17

Visualisation of male and female character mentions across entire novel annotated

18 Macro-Level Analysis In addition to studying individual novels, we can use annotated texts and character networks to make comparisons across multiple novels and authors. Visualisation of male and female character mentions across entire novel annotated texts (Oliver Twist, Pride and Prejudice) Oliver Twist (1837) Pride and Prejudice (1813) 18

Macro-Level Analysis Comparison of percentages

19 Macro-Level Analysis Comparison of percentages of gendered edges for individual novels % Female-Female % Female-Male % Male-Male Top 10 novels, as ranked by proportion of Female-Female character interactions. Bottom 10 novels, as ranked by proportion of Female-Female character interactions. 19

20 Macro-Level Analysis Comparison of percentages of gendered edges in overall character networks across 51 novels All Authors Female Authors Male Authors 20

21 Macro-Level Analysis Comparison of most frequent male and female character attributes (51 novels, 8745 characters) 21

Nation, Genre and Gender Project Prof Gerardine Meaney (UCD Humanities Institute & School of English) Dr Derek Greene (UCD School of Computer Science & Insight Centre) Dr Karen Wade (UCD Humanities

22 Nation, Genre and Gender Project Prof Gerardine Meaney (UCD Humanities Institute & School of English) Dr Derek Greene (UCD School of Computer Science & Insight Centre) Dr Karen Wade (UCD Humanities Institute) Dr Maria Mulvany (UCD Humanities Institute) Dr Jenny Rothwell (UCD Humanities Institute & School of Computer Science) Siobhán Grayson (UCD School of Computer Science & Insight Centre)

So You Think You Know Jane Austen?

OXFORD WORLD S CLASSICS JOHN SUTHERLAND AND DEIRDRE LE FAYE So You Think You Know Jane Austen? A Literary Quizbook 1 INTRODUCTION FOR most of the last century, Oxford University Press was the self-appointed