Grimm's Fairy Tale Network

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2013

I have had some fun playing around analyzing the text of the stories in Grimm's Fairy Tales. There are 62 stories in this set and they contain many popular tales such as Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, and Rapunzel. The text analyzed is the English translation by Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes available at Project Gutenberg.

Story Connections

The graphic below is a simple network showing which stories are connected through the use of a common vocabulary. There are three different strengths of connection shown and I've tried to minimize the usual 'hairball' nature of these types of diagrams by only showing the top three connections for a story. Some stories will have more than three links because the link meets the top-three threshold for the story on the other end of the link. The shade of blue simply indicates the number of connections for that story - the darker the shade the more connections. Click on the image to see a larger version.


The diagram shows in the upper-right corner for example that 'Little Red Riding Hood' is strongly linked to 'The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids'. My analysis shows that the strength of this connection is due to them both using words like wolf, stones, door, belly, scissors, drowned, and devour.

 


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