Temporal Network Analysis of Literary Texts

We study temporal networks of characters in literature focusing on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll and the anonymous La Chanson de Roland (around 1100). The former, one of the most influential pieces of nonsense literature ever written, describes the adventures of Alice in a fantasy world with logic plays interspersed along the narrative. The latter, a song of heroic deeds, depicts the Battle of Roncevaux in 778 A.D. during Charlemagne’s campaign on the Iberian Peninsula. We apply methods recently developed by Taylor et al. [26] to find time-averaged eigenvector centralities, Freeman indices and vitalities of characters. We show that temporal networks are more appropriate than static ones for studying stories, as they capture features that the time-independent approaches fail to yield.