Narrative structure of A Song of Ice and Fire creates a fictional world with realistic measures of social complexity

Abstract

Network science and data analytics are used to quantify static and dynamic structures in George R. R. Martin’s epic novels, A Song of Ice and Fire, works noted for their scale and complexity. By tracking the network of character interactions as the story unfolds, it is found that structural properties remain approximately stable and comparable to real-world social networks. Furthermore, the degrees of the most connected characters reflect a cognitive limit on the number of concurrent social connections that humans tend to maintain. We also analyze the distribution of time intervals between significant deaths measured with respect to the in-story timeline. These are consistent with power-law distributions commonly found in interevent times for a range of nonviolent human activities in the real world. We propose that structural features in the narrative that are reflected in our actual social world help readers to follow and to relate to the story, despite its sprawling extent. It is also found that the distribution of intervals between significant deaths in chapters is different to that for the in-story timeline; it is geometric rather than power law. Geometric distributions are memoryless in that the time since the last death does not inform as to the time to the next. This provides measurable support for the widely held view that significant deaths in A Song of Ice and Fire are unpredictable chapter by chapter.

Network analysis of the Kyiv bylyny cycle -- east Slavic epic narratives

“…Complex networks cannot resolve such issues, of course. Still, very similar roles of "superheroes" are interesting explore in network terms, not least to gain insight into how people in medieval times sought to present their heroic icons, real or imaginary [30,16].…”

“…[27] for an extensive survey up to 2019 and Ref. [16] for more recent developments. In it, individual characters in a text are represented by nodes and interactions between them are represented by edges.…”

“…We consider epics from the heyday of Kyivan Rus' the end of the ninth century to the middle of the eleventh century. While narrative analysis is traditionally the prerogative of the humanities [7], and while societalstructure analysis is traditionally the subject of social sciences, the involvement of methods and concepts imported from the natural sciences is now broadly accepted in academia [16].…”

A Network Map of The Witcher

“…To extract the social network [5][6][7] of The Witcher, I used the following text-processing procedure on each book. First, I tokenized every book into a list of sentences and then labeled each sentence by the name of the characters appearing in that sentence.…”

“…Second, I defined a window size as the distance of two pairs of sentences and assumed that if two characters are mentioned in two sentences within this window then there is an edge with a weight of one between them. The following two quoted sentences illustrate when the two mentions occur in the same sentence or two sentences apart: Then, I tested several window sizes (1,3,5,6,7), and based on the completeness of the network and the level of noise, I decided to use a window size of five sentences. Following this rule, I finally arrived at a network of 541 nodes (characters) among whom there are 3,306 links total, with a median connection strength of five.…”