About This Project
Combining literary and data science expertise, this project maps and analyses social networks in Irish and English fiction, 1800-1922. It explores how writers and readers have imagined the connections between people in their society and turned those connections into plots. The project, funded by the Irish Research Council, has completed work on 46 novels to date. The three initial case studies here are showcased to demonstrate the new perspectives which social network analysis can open up on well known novels.
Social network analysis opens up a new way of looking at James Joyce’s 1916 novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and casts Dublin society at the time in a surprising light. Understanding social networks in Pride and Prejudice allows us to understand more fully how complex and changing relationships drive Austen’s much imitated plot. In one of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels, Phineas Finn, we can see the ways in which political and personal networks are intertwined and the impact of political history on literature.
Publications and Papers
2016
Meaney, Gerardine and Derek Greene, ‘Social Network Data Analysis and the Nineteenth Century Novel’, Women’s Society in the Eighteenth Century (workshop), University of Warwick, March 2016
Meaney, Gerardine, and Derek Greene, ‘Reconciling Close and Distant Reading: Social Network Analysis of the Novel in the Long Nineteenth Century’ (Doing Digital Humanities: Bridging the Gap between Quantitative and Qualitative Methods, FRIAS, University of Freiburg, April 2016)
Grayson, Siobhán, Karen Wade, Gerardine Meaney, and Derek Greene, ‘The Sense and Sensibility of Different Sliding Windows in Constructing Co-Occurrence Networks from Literature’ (2nd IFIP International Workshop on Computational History and Data-Driven Humanities, Trinity College Dublin, 2016) (Link to PDF)
Grayson, Siobhán, Karen Wade, Gerardine Meaney, Jennie Rothwell, Maria Mulvany, and Derek Greene, ‘Discovering Structure in Social Networks of 19th Century Fiction’, in Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Web Science (presented at the Web Science 2016, Hanover, Germany, 2016), pp. 325–26 (Link to text)
Meaney, Gerardine, Derek Greene, Maria Mulvany, Jennie Rothwell, and Karen Wade, ‘Revolutionary Networks: Joyce, Jacob and the Streets of Dublin’ (XV International AEDEI (Spanish Association for Irish Studies) Conference, University of Zaragoza, Spain, 2016)
Wade, Karen, Siobhán Grayson, ‘A Flirt’s Progress: Scandal and Social Networks in Early 19th-Century Novels’ (Women’s Society 1750-1830, University of Notre Dame Global Gateway, London, July 2016)
2015
Meaney, Gerardine, Derek Greene, and Karen Wade, ‘Social Network Analysis and the Novel: Nation, Gender, Genre’ (Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts Conference, Dublin City University, September 2015)
Meaney, Gerardine, Karen Wade, Derek Greene, ‘Reconciling Distant and Close Reading: A Social Network Analysis of Phineas Finn’ (International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures, University of York, July 2015)
Meaney, Gerardine, ‘A Comparative Social Network Analysis of Irish and English Fiction, 1800-1922’ (Digital Scholarship Seminar, NUI Galway, November 2015)
For the latest publications related to this project please see the Nation, Genre and Gender Slideshare channel.
Data
Sample data for three case studies is available online. Full corpus to follow in the second phase of the project.
