Building and Analyzing a Semantic Network

Maria Telegina, (Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford)
gives a talk for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer
School. The history of graph (network) theory (GNT) started with an
attempt to find a single walking path, which crosses, once and only
once, each of the seven bridges of old Königsberg; this is known as
the Seven Bridges of Königsberg Problem. Since 1736, when Leonhard
Euler proved the problem to be unsolvable using a very simple
graph, GNT was developed, and it rapidly came to be used in a
number of fields. Nowadays, GNT is actively used in a wide variety
of disciplines from mathematics and physics to sociology and
linguistics, as our world is full of systems, which can be
represented and analyzed as networks. The main focus of this talk
is a presentation of a network analysis, based on a semantic
network constructed on Japanese temporal and spatial lexical items.
The network is based on the results of a free word association
experiment conducted in Tokyo in 2015. Due to the nature of the
material, the network is highly clustered and has a relatively
short average path length; in other words, it is a good example of
a small world network. As the general framework of GNT, along with
some practical information on how to build and analyze a network in
R or Gephi will also be presented, the contents of this talk are
also relevant to analyses of any system with coupled elements.