“Great Stories Are Built on Different Relationship Structures”: Narrative Network Analysis and the H
Humans have always created stories to make sense of the world.
Narratology has long belonged to the humanities. Traditional approaches focused on individual characters’ psychology or linear cause and effect in plot development. Recent work in network science, however, shows that stories can also be understood as systems of relationships. From this perspective, what matters is not just who the characters are, but how they are connected.
More importantly, successful stories often share distinctive patterns in the structure of character relationships. These structural features shape tension, engagement, and emotional impact.
In this post, we explore the new insights offered by data driven narrative analysis and how network approaches help explain why some stories resonate more than others.