Social Network Analysis in Classic Vernacular Chinese Novel: Take The Scholars as Example
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Liao, Chun-fan
Abstract
The classic realistic vernacular novel “The Scholars” pioneered Chinese satire. It has a unique narrative style, in which there are hundreds of characters but none of them leads the story. It is the best-known novel during Qing Dynasty, just the same as “Dream of the Red Chamber”. However, the attention it acquires and the research been done on it are much less compared with the latter, and despite the extensive application of social network analysis, it is less applied to textual analysis. Therefore, we tried to use information technology to construct and analyze the social network of “The Scholars” and answered questions related to social network problems.
In our research, we discovered that there is a high proportion of role dialogues in The Scholars, which is the most important source of role relations. Therefore, we designed a semi-automatic method to extract data from the full text of The Scholars using an algorithm called “word clipper”, and construct the social network based on the conversations of characters. After that, we did a preliminary textual analysis based on those quantitive data.
During our analysis, besides finding out the community each role belongs, we discovered the importance of a little-researched character JIN Dong-ya, and learned the exact role-iterating status of The Scholars based on the talking of each characters.
Subjects
The Scholars
social network analysis
word clipper
dialogues
Type
thesis
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