Analysis of a Play by Means of CHAPLIN, the Characters and Places Interaction Network Software

Recently, we have developed a software able of gathering information on social networks from written texts. This software, the CHAracters and PLaces Interaction Network (CHAPLIN) tool, is implemented in Visual Basic. By means of it, characters and places of a literary work can be extracted from a list of raw words. The software interface helps users to select their names out of this list. Setting some parameters, CHAPLIN creates a network where nodes represent characters/places and edges give their interactions. Nodes and edges are labelled by performances. In this paper, we propose to use CHAPLIN for the analysis a William Shakespeare’s play, the famous “Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark”. Performances of characters in the play as a whole and in each act of it are given by graphs

Readers and Reading in the First World War

This essay consists of three individually authored and interlinked sections. In ‘A Digital Humanities Approach’, Francesca Benatti looks at datasets and databases (including the UK Reading Experience Database) and shows how a systematic, macro-analytical use of digital humanities tools and resources might yield answers to some key questions about reading in the First World War. In ‘Reading behind the Wire in the First World War’ Edmund G. C. King scrutinizes the reading practices and preferences of Allied prisoners of war in Mainz, showing that reading circumscribed by the contingencies of a prison camp created an unique literary community, whose legacy can be traced through their literary output after the war. In ‘Book-hunger in Salonika’, Shafquat Towheed examines the record of a single reader in a specific and fairly static frontline, and argues that in the case of the Salonika campaign, reading communities emerged in close proximity to existing centres of print culture. The focus of this essay moves from the general to the particular, from the scoping of large datasets, to the analyses of identified readers within a specific geographical and temporal space. The authors engage with the wider issues and problems of recovering, interpreting, visualizing, narrating, and representing readers in the First World War

Network analysis of named entity co-occurrences in written texts

The use of methods borrowed from statistics and physics to analyze written texts has allowed the discovery of unprecedent patterns of human behavior and cognition by establishing links between models features and language structure. While current models have been useful to unveil patterns via analysis of syntactical and semantical networks, only a few works have probed the relevance of investigating the structure arising from the relationship between relevant entities such as characters, locations and organizations. In this study, we represent entities appearing in the same context as a co-occurrence network, where links are established according to a null model based on random, shuffled texts. Computational simulations performed in novels revealed that the proposed model displays interesting topological features, such as the small world feature, characterized by high values of clustering coefficient. The effectiveness of our model was verified in a practical pattern recognition task in real networks. When compared with traditional word adjacency networks, our model displayed optimized results in identifying unknown references in texts. Because the proposed representation plays a complementary role in characterizing unstructured documents via topological analysis of named entities, we believe that it could be useful to improve the characterization of written texts (and related systems), specially if combined with traditional approaches based on statistical and deeper paradigms

Digital African Literatures and the Coloniality of Data

This article has been published by the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.Digital iterations of African literary texts present scholarly opportunities to interrogate how literature produced and circulated on digital media becomes entangled with the capitalist politics of datafication. In the data paradigm described in the article, literary representations are subject to the workings of neoliberal capital and the constraints of algorithmic systems. Through a postcolonial approach that puts the digital humanities in conversation with African literary studies, the article transcends how digital technologies have evidently changed African literature and tackles the costs of digital literary cultures and networks from Africa. I examine data relations through an African literary culture, which, in the current moment, indisputably exhibits the attainment of new and complex elements including the integration of digital affordances in the production and critical reception of texts. How African literary expressions in a digital age circulate in market-driven digital platforms like Facebook and YouTube makes the subjects of data capitalism or the coloniality of data as important for African literature as the expanded literary networks enabled by the digital

Mapping an ancient historian in a digital age: the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Image Archive (HESTIA)

HESTIA (the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive) employs the latest digital technology to develop an innovative methodology to the study of spatial data in Herodotus' Histories. Using a digital text of Herodotus, freely available from the Perseus on-line library, to capture all the place-names mentioned in the narrative, we construct a database to house that information and represent it in a series of mapping applications, such as GIS, GoogleEarth and GoogleMap Timeline. As a collaboration of academics from the disciplines of Classics, Geography, and Archaeological Computing, HESTIA has the twin aim of investigating the ways geography is represented in the Histories and of bringing Herodotus' world into people's homes

Co-occurrence matrices of time series applied to literary works

Recently, it has been proposed to analyse the literary works, plays or novels, using graphs to display the social network of their interacting characters. In this approach, the timeline of the literary work is lost, because the storyline is projected on a planar graph. However, timelines can be used to build some time series and analyse the work by means of vectors and matrices. These series can be used to describe the presence and relevance, not only of words in the text, but also of persons and places portrayed in the drama or novel. In this framework, we discuss here an approach with co-occurrence matrices plotted over time, concerning the presence of characters in the pages of a novel. These matrices are similar to those appearing in recurrence plot