Network theory has been used to analyse literary works by means of representing fictional characters and their relations as nodes connected by edges in a graph. In this Jupyter Notebook we analyse a social network representing the plot of Breaking Bad, the famous tv-show, by looking at its features and how they evolve with time.
The purpose of this analysis is to demonstrate that fictional plots might be represented with strongly tied networks that show asymmetries in the distribution of edges. This type of networks, like small-worlds[1] or scale-free networks[2], are typical of many systems in biology, physics and social sciences. These networks are studied because they model many real-world systems, like neuron cells, protein systems or voters’ networks. For clear reasons, it is extremely interesting for literary studies to discover that fictional plots might be modelled with networks that already have applications in real-world situations. The presence of small-world phenomena regulating fictional stories might suggest a resemblance between narrative and real-world situations, thus supporting the Aristotelian theory that every fiction is a mimesis of reality [3][4].
The graph was created by Francesco Bailo and it's available at this link.
[1] D.J. Watts and S.H. Strogatz, Collective dynamics of “smallworld” networks, Nature, Vol-ume 393, 1998, pages 440–442.
[2] A.-L. Barabasi and R. Albert, Emergence of scaling in random networks, Science, Volume 286, 1999, pages 509– 512.
[3] F. Moretti, Network theory, plot analysis, A Stanford Lit Lab Pamphlet, 2011, http://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet2A.Text.pdf.
[4] A. C. Sparavigna, On social Networks in Plays and Novels, International Journal of Sciences, 2013, https://doi.org/10.18483/ijSci.312