{"title":"Contact-Tracing War and Peace: A Critical Experiment in Social Network Analysis","authors":"Richard Hughes Gibson, Monica Colón","doi":"10.1016/j.ruslit.2023.06.003","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p><span>The piece applies a novel approach to the social network analysis of fiction to Tolstoy’s sprawling masterpiece, </span><em>War and Peace</em>. We propose that an approach that prioritizes physical proximity provides an illuminating contrast to the typical methods for extracting social networks in fiction that are based on the proximity of character names within the text. In addition to its methodological argument, this article offers commentary on the positions of characters within the novel’s social network and the changing nature of that social network across the novel’s parts. We demonstrate that in the first half of the novel Tolstoy builds a tight-knit “social center” that the second half breaks down.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":43192,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"RUSSIAN LITERATURE","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304347923000157","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE, SLAVIC","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The piece applies a novel approach to the social network analysis of fiction to Tolstoy’s sprawling masterpiece, War and Peace. We propose that an approach that prioritizes physical proximity provides an illuminating contrast to the typical methods for extracting social networks in fiction that are based on the proximity of character names within the text. In addition to its methodological argument, this article offers commentary on the positions of characters within the novel’s social network and the changing nature of that social network across the novel’s parts. We demonstrate that in the first half of the novel Tolstoy builds a tight-knit “social center” that the second half breaks down.
期刊介绍:
Russian Literature combines issues devoted to special topics of Russian literature with contributions on related subjects in Croatian, Serbian, Czech, Slovak and Polish literatures. Moreover, several issues each year contain articles on heterogeneous subjects concerning Russian Literature. All methods and viewpoints are welcomed, provided they contribute something new, original or challenging to our understanding of Russian and other Slavic literatures. Russian Literature regularly publishes special issues devoted to: • the historical avant-garde in Russian literature and in the other Slavic literatures • the development of descriptive and theoretical poetics in Russian studies and in studies of other Slavic fields.