Analyzing Narratives in Social Networks (eBook)

This book uses literature as a wrench to pry open social networks and to ask different questions than have been asked about social networks previously. The book emphasizes the story-telling aspect of social networks, as well as the connection between narrative and social networks by incorporating narrative, dynamic networks, and time. Thus, it constructs a bridge between literature, digital humanities, and social networks. This book is a pioneering work that attempts to express social and philosophic constructs in mathematical terms.

The material used to test the algorithms is texts intended for performance, such as plays, film scripts, and radio plays; mathematical representations of the texts, or 'literature networks', are then used to analyze the social networks found in the respective texts. By using literature networks and their accompanying narratives, along with their supporting analyses, this book allows for a novel approach to social network analysis.

Zvi Lotker is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Engineering at Bar-Ilan University, Israel since 2018.  He graduated with a double B.Sc. in Mathematics, Computer Science, and Industrial Engineering, from Ben Gurion University in 1991. In 1997, he obtained an M.Sc. in Mathematics, and in 2003, obtained  his Ph.D. in Distributed Algorithms, both from Tel Aviv University. He was Postdoctoral Fellow at the CWI in Amsterdam, MPI in Saarbrücken Germany, and Mascotte in Nice France from 2003 to 2006. He was Associate Professor in the Communication Systems Engineering department at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva in the Communication Systems Engineering department from 2010-2020.

His main research areas are communication networks, online algorithms, sensor networks, and recently, social networks. In 2018, he was awarded the SIROCCO Prize for Innovation in Distributed Computing.