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Graph and matrix metrics to analyze ergodic literature for children

Published: 25 June 2012 Publication History

Abstract

What can graph and matrix based mathematical models tell us about ergodic literature? A digraph of storylets connected by links and the corresponding adjacency matrix encoding is used to formulate some queries regarding hypertexts of this type. It is reasoned that the Google random surfer provides a useful model for the behavior of the reader of such fiction. This motivates the use of graph and Web based metrics for ranking storylets and some other tasks. A dataset, termed childif, based on printed books from three series popular with children and young adults and its characteristics are described. Two link-based metrics, SMrank and versions of PageRank, are described and applied on childif to rank storylets. It is shown that several characteristics of these stories can be expressed as and computed with matrix operations. An interpretation of the ranking results is provided. Results on some acyclic digraphs indicate that the rankings convey useful information regarding plot development. In conclusion, using matrix and graph theoretic techniques one can extract useful information from this type of ergodic literature that would be harder to obtain by simply reading it or by examining the underlying digraph.

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  • (2013)Onomatology and content analysis of ergodic literatureProceedings of the 3rd Narrative and Hypertext Workshop10.1145/2462216.2462221(1-5)Online publication date: 1-May-2013

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cover image ACM Conferences
HT '12: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM conference on Hypertext and social media
June 2012
340 pages
ISBN:9781450313353
DOI:10.1145/2309996
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 25 June 2012

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Author Tags

  1. directed graph
  2. ergodic
  3. hypertext
  4. interactive fiction
  5. link analysis
  6. matrix function
  7. pagerank
  8. path problem
  9. ranking
  10. smrank
  11. stochastic matrix
  12. storylet

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HT '12
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HT '12: 23rd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
June 25 - 28, 2012
Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA

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HT '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 33 of 120 submissions, 28%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 378 of 1,158 submissions, 33%

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  • (2013)Onomatology and content analysis of ergodic literatureProceedings of the 3rd Narrative and Hypertext Workshop10.1145/2462216.2462221(1-5)Online publication date: 1-May-2013

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