SageNET:
Construction and analysis of sages’ social networks
Led by: Prof. Zhitomirsky-Geffet, Dr. Katzoff, Dr. Schler and Dr. Zadok
Social network analysis of characters in historical works is a popular research methodology in the study of historical literature. This article proposes using this methodology to characterize and comparatively analyze editing styles of similar historical literary works to determine whether they were edited by the same hand. To that end, the study proposes constructing a network of characters for each of the works being studied and to compute standard statistical measures for these networks, thus producing a network-based profile for the editing style of each work, which can be compared to the profiles of various other works. To determine the effectiveness of this new approach, it was tested on two similar works from the realm of Rabbinic literature – the Mishnah and the Tosefta. Our findings show that despite the abundant structural, thematic, and linguistic similarities of the works, their network-based profiles demonstrated clear differences between them with respect to various parameters, like the degree of connectivity, density, and centrality of the networks and their communities, and also with respect to the usage of different types of relationships in each network. These differences are reflected in the network features of the works, rather than in their texts, and so it would be difficult to identify them using direct stylometric analysis on the texts of the works, especially given the stylistic and thematic similarity between them. The approach presented in this article forms a basis for developing automatic classifiers to identify different editors and editing styles based on works’ network-based profiles.
Table 1: Precision and recall in identifying relationships between sages for the Mishnah and Tosefta.
The heat maps in Figures 1 and 2 show the percentage of overlap between the appearances of sages and relationships in parallel tractates of the Mishnah and Tosefta. As can be observed, the colors are darker for sages (Figure 1) than they are for relationships (Figure 2). The relatively prominent dark diagonal in the heat map of sage overlaps indicates the high degree of overlap for parallel tractates of the two works, relative to the light diagonal, which does not stand out compared to the rest of the heat map in Figure 2. In fact, at the tractate level, the overlap degree with respect to the mention of the same sages is 42.27% on average, whereas for the mention of the same relationships between a pair of sages in parallel tractates of the two works, it is only 15.52%. This finding supports the hypothesis that the network-based profile (whose basic informational building block is the relationships between characters, rather than the characters themselves) can provide an effective indicator for distinguishing types of redaction of similar works.
Figure 1: Overlap of sages between parallel tractates of Mishnah and Tosefta.
Figure 2: Overlap of relationships among sages between parallel tractates of Mishnah and Tosefta
Table 2: Amounts of tanna'im and relationships between tanna'im in the two works. Normalization to the size of the work is according to the number of tanna'im or relationships per 10,000 words. The Mishnah, as we have it, has 200,907 words, and the Tosefta has 295,780.
Work name
Figure 3: The Mishnah network. The size of the node represents the 'degree' metric. The colors of the nodes represent different communities, determined by the 'modularity' parameter. The size of the characters indicates the 'betweenness centrality' metric.
Figure 4: The Tosefta network. The size of the node represents the 'degree' metric. The colors of the nodes represent different communities, determined by the 'modularity' parameter. The size of the characters indicates the 'betweenness centrality' metric.
Publications:
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Avital Zadok, Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet, Jonathan Schler, Binyamin Katzoff, Comparative network analysis as a new approach to the editorship profiling task: A case study of the Mishnah and Tosefta from Rabbinic literature, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2023;, fqad038, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqad038