Investigating ego nodes and connections

In egocentric network analysis, we are interested in learning more about the communities that exist around a single node in a network. We are much less interested in the structure and makeup of the entire network. We are “zooming in,” so to speak. We will use egocentric network analysis to inspect the communities that exist around core characters from Les Miserables.

Ego 1 – Valjean

According to Wikipedia, Jean Valjean is the protagonist of Les Miserables. Knowing this, it makes sense that Valjean has the highest PageRank score of all characters in the network. The main character of any story typically interacts with more characters than anyone else, and PageRank will reflect that. For the sake of this chapter, this is as much background digging as we will do per character. If you want to do a thorough analysis of the networks that exist in a piece of literature, you should go much deeper. In this chapter, I am most...