Modeling Structure and Content: Socio-Semantic Network Analysis of the Mahābhārata

There is a demand to incorporate content information into social networks. The authors constructed and visualized a network of the most important gods and heroes in the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata. The network includes semantic information about the actors and their relationships. These two types of information were collected automatically with the help of the Nubbi topic modeling algorithm, which assigns separate sets of topics to both persons and their relations. The visualization of such a network provides intuitive access to a high density of information, like the topic distribution for each actor and the predominant topic for each relation.