Sørina Higgins’s lecture at Mythmoot IV gave us a hint about where she’s going intellectually in the near future. She wants to apply network theory to create “meta-fictional narratives” about the interactions among the Inklings and how it affected their writing, and invited us to do the same.

The coolest figure from “Graph Theory as a Mathematical Model in Social Science”

This seemed like a good time to blow the dust off my command of graph theory. You can figure out lots of cool things from networks, if you know about graphs.   Frank Harary, writing from a period contemporary with The Lord of the Rings until well into this century, pushed the use of mathematical graph theory into the social sciences.  Here’s a short version.  Here’s what I think is his clearest explication of what can be done with graphs in the social sciences (which is what we are doing, now).

For instance, graphs are used a lot in management theory.  The fastest performing network structures were those in which the distance of all nodes from some central person (the “integrator”) was the shortest, say Borgatti, Stephen P., et al. “Network analysis in the social sciences.” science323.5916 (2009): 892-895. Now, if you’re looking for a paradigm of a stable, efficiently operating organization, the Inklings are not an obvious place to start.  I’m pretty sure that C.S. Lewis would turn out to be the integrator, but then what?  Here’s a chart from Borgatti et al. that might clarify the relevance:

Following Sørina’s Ansatz, we might begin with the box on the left to determine our set of writers (nodes). Next, we’d assign a numerical quantity to each node, probably derived from a lexomic analysis.  Then, we’d build links from the two boxes on the right, Interactions and Flows, based on accounts of how the writers interacted, to see how some attribute of the nodes changes over time.

The easiest thing to see would be something like the spread of Theosophy or Anthroposophy. Weird philosophies come with an idiosyncratic jargon that should be trivial to find in the writers’ texts. The mathematical tools we’d need to identify the influence of some *osophy have already been developed to model the spread of infectious disease.

Slightly more difficult would be to track down an agreement between the writers to split things up.  There was the famous wager between Tolkien and C.S. Lewis about writing a time-travel and a space-travel story, respectively.  We’d look for some lexemes they shared equally, which then split up mitotically into space on Lewis’s side and time on Tolkien’s. But a difficulty presents itself. It might be possible to find lexemes in Tolkien that correlate well with space travel, but I can’t think of them.  We’d have to find them via statistical correlations, which tend to make the final result less credible.  A better choice might be King Arthur.  In an old lecture on Youtube, Sørina mentions that Tolkien may have given up work on Arthurian legends because Charles Williams was doing so much in that area. It should be easy to find convincing Arthurian terms whose frequency evolves over time.

Caveat:  Sørina drops a hint that she’s dealing with a large network, which the Inklings are not.  We’ll have to wait and see.