Network Analysis of R. L. Stevenson and the ’45

I’m starting to work on my talk for the Seattle MLA on Stevenson, Oliphant, and Victorian constructions of the Scottish “Rising” of 1745. Of particular interest is the seven-year gap between Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Catriona — a sequel that picks up Kidnapped at the instant it closes. They are vastly different novels — the protagonist in each, David Balfour, is catapulted from a Highland Bildungsroman to a sensational romance and political intrigue novel, complete with radically different characterizations of David. I thought one way I might take a look at this is to examine the network of characters in each novel, as a way to focus upon large structural differences. (I used Gutenberg ebooks, translated into TEI xml using the XSLT transformations described in an earlier post, and the Meandre OpenNLP and Protovis implementations to perform entity extraction and produce the force-directed graphs, linking characters that appear within three sentences of each other):

Characters in Kidnapped (1886); Force-Directed Network Graph

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