Description

HW 1 – module “Networks”

This is the first part of the first assignment (the next part will follow after this week’s lecture).
This assignment is to be completed in groups of 2 or 3, please form your groups on moodle (using the activity called “Group choice for assignment 1”). If you need help to look for teammates, use the “Teammate finder” forum. If you have any practical questions, please email us on remi.delogne@uclouvain.be .

Assignment 1: co-occurrence network of characters

Please choose one of the following options:
– Find an appealing book (for example, use the Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ to find the text), parse the textual information in order to reconstruct the co-occurrence network of characters. For example, two characters can be linked if they appear in the same paragraph.

– Find a screenplay from your favorite movie (there are many resources can be found by Googling, for example, https://thescriptsavant.com/free-moviescreenplays-am/). Convert the .pdf to text using any online tool and parse the textual information to reconstruct the co-occurrence network of characters, where two characters can be linked if they appear in the same scene. Scenes are usually distinguished in bold notation.

The only requirement here would be to choose a book or a movie with many characters (ideally more than 50). Tools for text processing were discussed on the first lecture.

Report guidelines:
• Write in a concise and structured manner. No long sentences, only relevant information.
• Any numerical result that can be presented in a table should be presented so.
• Round numbers up to 3rd digit, unless it’s really necessary. Don’t copy-paste 10 digits floats.
• Plots must be easy-to-read. Must include labels on axes, legend if more than one curve is shown, title or a caption, explaining what the plot is about.
• Network properties (k-core shell, community index, etc) can be visualized in color. When doing so, it’s a good practice to add a colourbar (k-core shell) or a summary of each or most representative communities.
• The final product will be a report of no more than 10 pages including figures.