• Organisation

In the following, we develop a method to study dramas as information networks. We examine how innovative characters are in relation to each other, i.e. whether they tend to repeat the utterances of others or introduce new information to the discourse of the play. Our method captures the role of characters in this discourse, and through pairwise comparisons, we can also construct networks that represent character relationships in a new way compared to existing approaches. By examining some of Shakespeare’s plays, we also identify general patterns regarding the structural differences of the networks and gender roles in comedies and tragedies/non-comedies.

This paper has been submitted to the conference track of JCLS. It has been peer reviewed and accepted for presentation and discussion at the 3rd Annual Conference of Computational Literary Studies at Vienna, Austria, in June 2024.