Analysis of a Play by Means of CHAPLIN, the Characters and Places Interaction Network Software

TL;DR

This paper presents CHAPLIN, a software tool that extracts and visualizes social interaction networks of characters and places in literary texts, demonstrated through Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Contribution

The paper introduces CHAPLIN, a novel software for analyzing social networks in literary works, with a specific application to Hamlet.

Findings

Generated interaction networks for the entire play and individual acts.

Visualized character and place interactions through labeled graphs.

Enabled detailed analysis of character performances and relationships.

Abstract

Recently, we have developed a software able of gathering information on social networks from written texts. This software, the CHAracters and PLaces Interaction Network (CHAPLIN) tool, is implemented in Visual Basic. By means of it, characters and places of a literary work can be extracted from a list of raw words. The software interface helps users to select their names out of this list. Setting some parameters, CHAPLIN creates a network where nodes represent characters/places and edges give their interactions. Nodes and edges are labelled by performances. In this paper, we propose to use CHAPLIN for the analysis a William Shakespeare's play, the famous 'Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark'. Performances of characters in the play as a whole and in each act of it are given by graphs.