In this position paper, the author proposes the use of social networks of characters as an AI narrative generation mechanism. The first part of the paper offers examples of recent research by literary critics on the relationship between character networks and narrative structure. The second part of the paper offers a simple example of story generation based on a structural balance network model. From Narratives to NetworksFinding realistic but tractable story generation mechanisms is an ongoing challenge for the narrative intelligence community. Most story generators rely on either (1) corpora of pre-existing stories (e.g., MEXICA 1 ), or (2) story grammars (e.g., TALESPIN 2 ). Efforts have been made to broaden generative mechanisms to include games as well as crowdsourcing. 3 In a recent paper, Pablo Gervas argues for the value of chess as a narrative generation mechanism: Chess provides a finite set of characters (pieces), a schematical representation of space (the board), and time (progressive turns), and a very restricted set of possible actions. Yet it also allows very elementary interpretations of game situations in terms of human concepts such as danger, threat, conflict, death, survival, victory or defeat, which can be seen as interesting building blocks for story construction. 4 There is a related body of work that makes use of sports games statistics to generate simple narratives akin to newspaper articles (

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This article contends that the evolution toward interdisciplinary collaboration that we are witnessing in the sciences must also occur in the humanities to ensure their very survival. That is, humanists must be open to working with scientists and social scientists interested in similar research questions and vice versa. Digital humanities is a positive first step. Complexity science should be the next step. Even though much of the ground-breaking work in complexity science has been done in the natural sciences and mathematics, it can, if critically adapted, provide the needed metaphor for a broad integration of disciplines, humanistic and otherwise. Given its almost a-disciplinary nature, a complexity approach to the research problems in the humanities necessarily breaks down silos. Moreover, it can restore and reframe the seamless intellectual fabric sought by researchers before the atomization of the various disciplines in the nineteenthcentury academy.

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