Character networks and book genre classification

摘要

We compared the social character networks of biographical, legendary and fictional texts in search for marks of genre differentiation. We examined the degree distribution of character appearance and found a power-law-like distribution that does not depend on the literary genre. We also analyzed local and global complex network measures, in particular, correlation plots between the recently introduced Lobby index and degree, betweenness and closeness centralities. Assortativity plots, which previous literature claims to separate fictional from real social networks, were also studied. We found no relevant differences among genres for the books studied when applying these network measures and we provide an explanation why the previous assortativity result is not correct.