/epigraphs

An API for looking up the epigraph database (and code to make the database)

Primary LanguagePythonMIT LicenseMIT

epigraphs

An API for looking up the epigraph database (and code to make the database)

This contains code to convert the epigraph data created by the project Digital Mapping the Literary Epigraph: Quantitative analysis of literary influence using network theory and thousands of epigraphs led by Graham Mathews from 2017 to 2020, funded by the MOE Tier 1 grant at Nanyang Technological University. This code was written by Francis Bond. Data is licenced under CC BY, code under the MIT license.

Citations

  • Francis Bond and and Graham Matthews (2018) Toward An Epic Epigraph Graph 11th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2018) Miyazaki

Data

Versions of the excel sheet used to collect the data and various subsidiary files are in the directory data

Scripts

Scripts to take the CSV, convert it to a database, clean it a little, and so forth are in the directory scripts. Which script does what are documented in the bash files.

  • do.bash produces the database
  • do-figs.bash produces figures for the Enslish paper
  • do-www.bash

Documentation

The epigraphs are available in three formats:

  • the original spreadsheet (.xlsx)
  • a cleaned up sqlite3 database (epigraph.db)
  • this is compressed for download (epigraph.db.7z)
  • indexes of who cites whom

Goals of this research

The investigators propose to use the epigraph (the quotation positioned at the start of many novels) as a clear empirical marker of literary influence between time periods and countries. We aim to build a corpus of approximately 20,000 epigraphs and thoroughly investigate the connections within this big data set using network theory. We will explore the resulting implications by constructing a digital map of the world that demonstrates the evolution of the novel and its influences.

Research questions

  • What were the key moral, philosophical, and aesthetic influences on literature through the ages?
  • How do different national literatures influence one another and what does the global map of literary "soft power" look like?
  • In what ways does visualising literature as a network rather than a set of discreet objects alter our understanding of the history of literature?

The outcome of this research project is the very first digital map of literary influence.

Install

$ sudo apt-get install -y python3-levenshtein