Mathias Énard: Compass - Network Analysis of Connection in the Novel

Well, I did something 'atrocious' with Compass by Mathias Énard. As soon as I started reading this book, I began to wonder how his demonstration of 'everything is connected' will look like in a visualization. The picture you see is the so called network analysis of the connections made in this book.

Few pointers:

1. All the items which are used in the book are broken in to 11 categories: Character, Concept, Entity, Event, Language, Literature, Music, Painting, People, Person. A person is a historical figure, a character is a character out of fictional writing, Event is for example a battle and so on.

2. Each class of item above are color coded.

3. Relations or connections you see in the picture are limited to the connections made in the book, that is to say, no connections are made from out of the book. In other words, we could find more relations than those that are made here external to the book from historical sources, but those are not used.

4. Size of a circle (called Nodes) represents the magnitude of its relation (called degree), or how much it is connected to other nodes.

Notes

1. Tools used - Gephi, YED, and good old N++
2. Potential imporovements abound in this representation, as for instance: (a) labelling the edges giving some clue to what actually connects two nodes, (b) bisecting the nodes in two broad super classes representing Orient and Occident, (c) assigning geospatial coordinates to the nodes based on the location and then overlaying this diagram on a map and so on.

Link to higher resolution drawing: Link