COMPLEX NETWORK ANALYSIS OF A GRAPHIC NOVEL: THE CASE OF THE BANDE DESSINÉE THORGAL

Vincent Labatut ()
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Vincent Labatut: Laboratoire Informatique d’Avignon (LIA), Avignon Université, 339 Chemin des Meinajariès, BP 1228, F-84911 Avignon Cedex 9, France

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2022, vol. 25, issue 05n06, 1-34

Abstract: The task of extracting and analyzing character networks from works of fiction, such as novels and movies, has been the object of a number of recent publications. However, only a very few of them focus on graphic novels, and even fewer on European graphic novels. In this paper, we focus on Thorgal, a bande dessinée, i.e. a comic of the French-Belgian tradition. We manually annotate all the volumes of this series, in order to constitute a corpus allowing us to extract its character network. We perform a descriptive analysis of the network structure and compare it to real-world and fictional social networks. We also study the effect of character filtering over the network structure. Finally, we leverage complex network analysis tools to answer two research questions from the literature, related to the similarity between Thorgal and the Saga of Icelanders; and to the position of women in the series. Our data and source code are both publicly available online.

Keywords: Character networks; graphic novels; complex network analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1142/S0219525922400033

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