Social Networks and Pre-Modern Literature 1300-1600

长期以来，文学批评一直试图通过社会情境来理解中世纪和早期现代文本，并在此过程中经常对社会网络感兴趣。然而，关于网络的工作在很大程度上没有依赖于网络理论。《社会网络与前现代文学》旨在为文学文本的理解打开一种新的跨学科的社会网络方法的潜力。在过去十年中，网络理论在几个学科中蓬勃发展，包括社会学、数学、细胞生物学、生态学、经济学和公共政策。网络理论的发展提供了识别、描述和分析承载文学文本或嵌入其想象世界的社会网络的新方法。例如，这些概念使我们能够清楚地区分枢纽（网络中高度连接的人，即具有“高程度”）和高度“中间性”的节点（网络中节点之间最短路径中包含的人比其他人更多）。网络中不同组之间的“枢纽”可能不是枢纽，但可能具有很高的间接性，反映了它们通过与这些组中的枢纽接触来连接弱连接组的能力。网络理论也为我们提供了工具，通过不同的标准来衡量连通性（这些标准决定了节点之间的联系），“时间解决”的研究越来越多地促使我们关注社会网络的时间性和动态性。我们的主要工作将是使用网络模型来分析1300-1600年间英国文学文本的叙述和流通，特别是骑士小说和罗宾汉传统。在网络理论中不断形成的概念的帮助下，两个工作坊将产生新的解释方法和新的阅读材料。我们会问，在想象社会结构和关系时，前现代文学文本在哪些方面与现代网络理论的发现和观察相匹配或不同？例如，罗宾汉可以被解读为一个人物，他通过将精英网络从这些网络的普通场所分离出来，恢复了基于礼物的交换模式。与此同时，追踪马洛里亚瑟王故事中的联系，可能有助于研究人员思考马洛里的骑士是如何（以及如何成功地）充当政治中心和更偏远群体之间的枢纽或桥梁的。我们可以问，爱情是否对同质性或相似性的吸引力敏感——“群体性”——这是社会网络中聚集性的背后，如果是，他们是如何表现和评价它的。对于参与者来说，仔细审视历史和文本社会世界之间的分歧及其对文学文本网络分析的影响将是至关重要的。一成不变地简化了的恋爱网络赋予了社交网络的哪些特性，又屏蔽或扭曲了哪些特性？在项目中加入一个互动式的社区嵌入式博物馆，进一步增加了创新成果和影响的潜力。研究人员和故事博物馆的学习和参与团队将以历史悠久的故事（罗宾汉和亚瑟王的骑士）为重点，开发一个针对学校教师和学生的项目，以促进更新和重新创造这些数百年历史的故事的意义，并激发基于故事的学习。友谊是一个潜在的核心主题，故事博物馆项目将专注于戏剧、即兴和学习者参与的故事。我们的研讨会还将开发研究成果，并发表在免费向公众提供的学术文章中。

Literary criticism has long sought to understand medieval and early modern texts through their social situations and has often been interested in social networks in its efforts to do so. This work on networks has largely proceeded, however, without relying on network theory. Social Networks and Pre-Modern Literature seeks to unlock the potential of a newly interdisciplinary approach to social networks for the understanding of literary texts.Network theory has flourished in several disciplines in the last decade, including sociology, mathematics, cellular biology, ecology, economics, and public policy. Developments in network theory offer new ways of identifying, describing and analysing the social networks that carried literary texts or that are embedded in their imagined worlds. These concepts, for instance, allow us clearly to distinguish between hubs (persons in a network who are highly connected, that is, possess 'high degree') and nodes of high 'betweenness' (persons included more often than others in the network's shortest paths between nodes). A 'hinge' between different groups in a network might not be a hub but might nonetheless have high betweenness, reflecting their capacity to bridge weakly connected groups by virtue of contact with hubs within those groups. Network theory also gives us tools to measure connectedness by varied criteria (which determine what counts as a tie between nodes) and 'time-resolved' studies increasingly prompt us to attend to the temporality and dynamism of social networks.Our main work will be to use network modelling to analyse the narratives and circulation of literary texts, especially chivalric romances and the Robin Hood tradition, in the period 1300-1600 in Britain. Two workshops will generate new interpretative methods and new readings with the help of concepts that continue to take shape in network theory. In what ways, we will ask, do pre-modern literary texts match or diverge from the findings and observations of modern network theory in imagining social structures and relations? Robin Hood, for instance, might be read as a figure who recuperates the gift-based modes of exchange of elite networks by sundering them from those networks' ordinary places. Tracing ties in Malory's Arthurian stories, meanwhile, might help a researcher to think about how (and how successfully) Malory's knights act as hubs or as bridges between political centres and more remote groups. We can ask whether romances are sensitive to the homophily or attraction of similarity-the 'groupishness'-that lies behind clustering in social networks and, if so, how they represent and value it. It will be vital for participants to scrutinize the divergence between historical and textual social worlds and its implications for network analysis of literary texts. Which properties of social networks do the invariably simplified networks of romances privilege and which do they occlude or distort?The involvement of an interactive, community-embedded museum in the project adds further potential for novel outcomes and impact. Focusing on long-established stories (Robin Hood and King Arthur's knights), researchers and The Story Museum's Learning and Participation team will develop a project targeted at school teachers and pupils to promote ways of renewing and recreating the meanings of these centuries-old narratives and to inspire story-based learning. Friendship is a potential core theme and the Story Museum project will focus on theatrical, improvisational and learner-participatory engagement with its tales. Our workshops will also develop research to be published in scholarly articles freely available to the public.