Roberto Rondinelli | Searcharxiv

arXiv2020

Biblical names' relationships in the Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Acts of Apostles

In this paper we extrapolate the information about Bible's characters and places, and their interrelationships, by using text mining network-based approach. We study the narrative structure of the WEB version of 5 books: the Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Acts of the Apostles. The main focus is the protagonists' names interrelationships in an analytical way, namely using various network-based methods and descriptors. This corpus is processed for creating a network: we download the names of people and places from Wikipedia's list of biblical names, then we look for their co-occurrences in each verse and, at the end of this process, we get N co-occurred names. The strength of the link between two names is defined as the sum of the times that these occur together in all the verses, in this way we obtain 5 adjacency matrices (one per book) of N by N couples of names. After this pre-processing phase, for each of the 5 analysed books we calculate the main network centrality measures (classical degree, weighted degree, betweenness and closeness), the network vulnerability and we run the Community Detection algorithm to highlight the role of Messiah inside the overall networks and his groups (communities). We have found that the proposed approach is suitable for highlighting the structures of the names co-occurrences. The found frameworks' structures are useful for interpreting the characters' plots under a structural point of view.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

Cultures as networks of cultural traits: A unifying framework for measuring culture and cultural distances

Making use of the information from the World Value Survey (WVS), and operationalizing a definition of national culture that encompasses both the relevance of specific cultural traits and the interdependence among them, this paper proposes a methodology to reveal the latent structure of national culture and to measure cultural distance between countries that takes into account both the difference in cultural traits and the difference in the network structure of national cultures. Exploiting the possibilities offered by copula graphical models for discrete data, this paper infers the cultural networks of all the countries included in the WVS (Wave 6) and proposes a novel unifying framework to measure national culture and international cultural distances. The Jeffreys' divergence between copula graphical models, taken as the measure of cultural distance between countries, captures the orthogonality of the two components of cultural distance: the one based on cultural traits and the one based on the network structure among them. Moreover, the two components are shown to correlate with different national and structural characteristics of cultural networks, thus encompassing the different informational sets related to national cultures.

stat.AP↗