Social Networks and the Language of Greek Tragedy

Abstract

Using the linguistic dependency treebanks and digitized texts created by the Perseus Digital Library, we are creating social networks for a collection of Greek tragedies that allow users to visualize the interactions between characters in the plays. Because the number of characters who appear on stage in Greek tragedy is limited, most of these social network diagrams fall into a few basic types. The most interesting aspect of these networks are, therefore, the edges that connect the nodes within the graphs. The linguistic data used to label or even create these edges becomes the jumping off point for visualizing and exploring the language of Greek tragedy.