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Tracking Social Networking In Shakespeare Plays

Posted by simoniker on from the rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-closely-allied dept.

An anonymous reader writes "By feeding PieSpy (an IRC bot used to visualise social networks) with the entire texts of Shakespeare plays, it became possible to produce drawings of the social networks present in his plays - it is now possible to visualize the relationships between the characters in his works, and see Shakespeare in an entirely new light."

9 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. What about... by lofoforabr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    feeding a program written in Shakespeare Programming Language to it? Should be real fun!

  2. As Spock would say... by DukeLinux · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Facinating. Unfortunately, the video on the web site raised an error. Slashdot effect? If this technique were applied to other great works I wonder if any patterns might emerge?

  3. Can ANYONE explain by Dark+Lord+Seth · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... the latest craze about social networks like Orkut or Friendster? I'm indifferent to the internet or the people on the internet so I highly doubt social networks on the net will ever be even slightly interesting for me, personally. But I really don't see what's worth the fuss about them, because they aren't exactly incorporating ground-breaking technologies, stunning visualizations nor original and efficient business plans. So while I don't doubt the fact these "social networks" are fun for those participating, I don't actually see anything about them that's worthy of a front page post on Slashdot...

    Maybe a nice new topic on Slashdot called "The Internet Society" with stuff like *logs, social networks and everything else regarding the social aspects of the internet?

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    Hate me!
    1. Re:Can ANYONE explain by yerM)M · · Score: 3, Interesting
      In this case there is some wonderful synergy between popular conceits (i.e. the wonder of social networks) and science (i.e. the wonder of protein networks). One interesting aspect of both such networks is the concept of hubs.

      Let's take the yeast protein interaction network as an example. This network describes the physical interaction of various proteins in that protein A binds to protein B and does something useful, like telling your mitochondria to make more energy. It turns out that some proteins interact with WAY more proteins than on average. In yeast some interact with >260 proteins while the average is around 3. For social networks, think of Kevin Bacon here.

      Now, well add some complexity. Suppose you want to initially model a human disease in yeast. Now you have to find the networks that the human has in common with the yeastie. If this happens to include the proteins associated with the disease you would like to model, bang, you're in luck. Chances are that this small network will include a hub, but in my experience they are just hangers-on and not really related to the disease model.

      Now back to social networks. Let's suppose you identify a collection of the population with some desireable relationship, let's say for example that you notice that a cluster of people tend to buy low-end luxury cars. You can annotate their small network with as much data as possible, where they went to school, what year, the cost of the houses they own, where they live, etc. This becomes a kernel from which you can find other social networks in other places. Now that you have this matching piece, who would you choose to give the wicked low discount on a BMW? You guessed it, the hub. More people would see her/him driving along beaming and glowing in a spanking new beamer. I can almost guarantee that this will happen at some point in the future. Currently the hub's are celeberities because they are 'seen' by more people, but it is kind of impersonal.

      In any case, the main problem is that social networks are HUGE so much more complicated to search in this way. If you are interested, you can check out my paper in PNAS

      Now if I could just find some investors for the social network side...

  4. Re:ENG 201 by templest · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You must of had a pretty crappy teacher then. TV pretty much made me hate shakespear back in the day, but my highschool english teacher actually made it good. Macbeth kicks ass, and to you sir, I bite my thumb.

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    I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
  5. feds can use it by oohp · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This can be used by the FBI do track down script kiddies. They put it on a couple of channels where the kiddie is on, see who's the kiddie's friends are, identify them, catch them, interrogate them, find out who the kiddie is and catch him.

  6. We used to do that back in school... by ferkelparade · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...only for Schiller plays because that's what's usually read in German classrooms. Basically, we created a chart for every play where all the characters were connected by four different types of arrows which were labeled "kills", "tries to kill", "fucks" and "tries to fuck". Ah, the memories...

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    frotz grue
  7. Re:ENG 201 by Keebler71 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder what Shakespeare would think if he knew that his plays were learned by students the world over in TEXT format. These were -plays- after all. I think he would be happier with people viewing them as movies than just sitting and reading them.

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    "It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
  8. /. Friends by wideBlueSkies · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder how this would look if applied to the /. friends/foes database.

    It'd be interesting to see how the community is aligned.

    wbs.

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    Huh?