Distant reading of the undead literature
Network-based analyses of vampiric and revenant figures across transnational literary traditions — from Romanian strigoi to the Gothic canon.
Mapping the worlds of the undead
From the strigoi of Romanian fiction to the vampires and revenants of the Gothic and pulp traditions, the undead are among literature's most persistent figures. Undead Networks studies this trope with the tools of the digital humanities: each work in the archive becomes structured data that we read at a distance, alongside close reading of the text itself.
For every work, we record who speaks, to whom, and in whose silent presence, and from this we build character networks and vocabulary profiles. The aim is not to replace reading with numbers, but to raise new questions: where the undead stand in their worlds, who mediates between the living and the dead, and how Romanian and international traditions imagine the revenant differently.
Now in development: literary geography, mapping the places each work moves through and how its characters, living and undead, travel between them.
Character networks
Weighted graphs of dialogue and co-presence, with centrality measures and community detection.
Vocabulary profiles
Lexical diversity, part-of-speech patterns and the words each character reserves for particular partners.
Human-in-the-loop, open source
Automatic extraction checked and annotated by researchers, with the full pipeline released under GPL-3.0.
Miss Christina — Character Network
Based on the novel by Mircea Eliade — a strigoi haunting rendered as an interactive character network with a vocabulary complexity profile.