2020
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2006465117
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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 hu… Show more

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Cited by 17 publications
(15 citation statements)
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“…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].…”
Section: Bylynymentioning
confidence: 99%
See 2 more Smart Citations
“…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].…”
Section: Bylynymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…[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.…”
Section: The Kyiv Bylyny Networkmentioning
confidence: 99%
See 1 more Smart Citation
“…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.…”
Section: /10 3 Network Definitionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…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.…”
Section: /10 3 Network Definitionmentioning
confidence: 99%