Miles Ott

I recently read in Inside Science that physicists had applied network analytic tools to discover whether three classic myths: Beowulf, the Iliad, and Tain Bo Cuailnge, were based in real life events (Here is the original article).    In a project that probably fell to some undergrad RA, the characters from each of the three stories were entered in a database, and links, coded as either hostile or friendly, were assigned between the characters who had relationships.

According to their coding of the data, Beowulf had 74 characters, the Iliad had 716 characters, and Tain Bo Cuailnge had 404 characters. Once the network was constructed for each myth, they calculated different network statistics, like the mean number of people that each person had links with and whether those with many links tended to be connected with others who had many links (called degree assortativity).  If networks are highly assortative (meaning that people are more likely to be linked with others who have a similar number of links) it is thought that these networks are more true to real life.  They came to the conclusion that the Iliad is the most realistic social network.

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