디지털 문학연구의 탐색과 적용: 『엠마』의 소셜네트워크 분석 = Exploring Digital Literary Study, an Application: Social Network Analysis of Emma

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Applying Social Network Analysis (SNA) to Jane Austen’s Emma, this paper offers a simple case study of digital literary study, through which an exemplary process of computing literary works can be illustrated from the perspective of a traditional literary critic. The main discussion proceeds with the four steps to detail the extraction process of character networks from Emma and the result: the specific goal, preprocessing of data, the working concepts (including centrality) and the packages used for the analysis, and the examination of the results with visualization. The SNA was conducted with a specific aim to see whether or, to what extent, its result corresponds to the main thesis of the paper that had been published by the same author in 2016: Miss Bates’ role and position as a “community bridge” or a “gossipmonger” in Highbury society. For detection of the character interactions, the study adopted the working notion of conversational network of both direct and indirect speeches, together with explicit mentions of characters during conversations. The result showed that Miss Bates’ centralities within the computed networks are highly relevant with the critical argument presented in the 2016 paper, although some aspects of the outputs demand critical interpretations. As a way for a literary criticism to converse with digital methodologies, the last discussion reviews the potentials and limits of digital literary study in terms of the SNA.