Kennen Sie schon … die Netzwerk-Visualisierungen zu Shakespeares Tragödien?

Mar­tin Grand­jean, ein Schweiz­er His­torik­er und Dig­i­tal-Human­i­ties-Wis­senschaftler sowie Experte für Net­zw­erk­analy­sen und ‑visu­al­isierun­gen, hat sich die elf Tragö­di­en Shake­spear­es vorgenom­men:

Are Shakespeare’s tragedies all struc­tured in the same way? Are the char­ac­ters rather iso­lat­ed, grouped, all con­nect­ed?

Nar­ra­tion, even fic­tion­al, con­tains a net­work of inter­act­ing char­ac­ters. Con­sti­tut­ing a well defined cor­pus, the eleven Shake­speare­an tragedies can eas­i­ly be com­pared: We pro­pose here a net­work visu­al­iza­tion in which each char­ac­ter is rep­re­sent­ed by a node con­nect­ed with the char­ac­ters that appear in the same scenes.

The result speaks for itself: the longest tragedy (Ham­let) is not the most struc­tural­ly com­plex and is less dense than King Lear, Titus Andron­i­cus or Oth­el­lo. Some plays reveal clear­ly the groups that shape the dra­ma: Mon­tague and Capulets in Romeo and Juli­et, Tro­jans and Greeks in Troilus and Cres­si­da, the tri­umvirs par­ties and Egyp­tians in Antony and Cleopa­tra, the Vols­cians and the Romans in Cori­olanus or the con­spir­a­tors in Julius Cae­sar.

Für die Visu­al­isierun­gen gilt:

Two char­ac­ters are con­nect­ed if they appear in the same scene.
Their size and col­or inten­si­ty are pro­por­tion­al to their weight­ed degree.
The ‘net­work den­si­ty’ mea­sures how close the graph is to com­plete. A com­plete graph (100%) has all pos­si­ble edges between its nodes.

Im Blog­post zu diesem Pro­jekt kön­nen Sie ein Poster mit allen elf Grafiken down­load­en.

In seinem Blog find­en Sie viele weit­ere Visu­al­isierun­gen.
Mar­tin Grand­jean ist unter @GrandjeanMartin übri­gens auch auf Twit­ter zu find­en.