Contact-Tracing War and Peace: A Critical Experiment in Social Network Analysis

The piece applies a novel approach to the social network analysis of fiction to Tolstoy’s sprawling masterpiece, War and Peace. We propose that an approach that prioritizes physical proximity provides an illuminating contrast to the typical methods for extracting social networks in fiction that are based on the proximity of character names within the text. In addition to its methodological argument, this article offers commentary on the positions of characters within the novel’s social network and the changing nature of that social network across the novel’s parts. We demonstrate that in the first half of the novel Tolstoy builds a tight-knit “social center” that the second half breaks down.