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arXiv · 2502.19590

A City of Millions: Mapping Literary Social Networks At Scale

Sil Hamilton·Rebecca M. M. Hicke·David Mimno·Matthew Wilkens
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Abstract

We release 70,509 high-quality social networks extracted from multilingual fiction and nonfiction narratives. We additionally provide metadata for $\sim$30,000 of these texts (73\% nonfiction and 27\% fiction) written between 1800 and 1999 in 58 languages. This dataset provides information on historical social worlds at an unprecedented scale, including data for 2,510,021 individuals in 2,805,482 pair-wise relationships annotated for affinity and relationship type. We achieve this scale by automating previously manual methods of extracting social networks; specifically, we adapt an existing annotation task as a language model prompt, ensuring consistency at scale with the use of structured output. This dataset serves as a unique resource for humanities and social science research by providing data on cognitive models of social realities.

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Sil Hamilton, Rebecca M. M. Hicke, David Mimno, Matthew Wilkens. 2025-02-26. A City of Millions: Mapping Literary Social Networks At Scale. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19590

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