Within the broader digital humanities field lies the application of mathematical techniques to understand and quantify literature. The use of these approaches can provide a different perspective on a work, can enhance our ability to visualize complex and evolving narratives, and can potentially quantify aspects of the narrative. This last feature is especially relevant for Black Library novels, as fans of the work may very well attempt to bring the events of the book to the tabletop – inherently an attempt at numerical quantification.
This talk presents two applications of this type of analysis in the context of the Horus Heresy. The first is an analysis of David Annandale’s Ruinstorm. Within that book, a loyalist fleet encounters the “Pilgrim Fleet”, a host of demon-corrupted wrecks. Using Lanchester’s Laws, a mathematical means of predicting the outcomes of combat, we can estimate the likely outcome of that battle – and importantly, how the outcome of that battle changes as familiar narrative elements of the Warhammer universe, such as demon corruption and heroic last stands alter the relatively straightforward math of naval combat in the 31st millennium.
The second application is the use of co-appearance (two characters appearing in the same section of a book) to construct a social network of the characters in the book. Widely used in network science (most famously in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables), we present a co-appearance social network of the first three books of the Horus Heresy. These networks reveal some key features of the narrative – the tight bonds of the Sons of Horus Mournival, the gradual isolation of the civilian Remembrancers, and Loken’s central role in linking groups together in the early novels. We also present results comparing developing this network via a close reading of the text itself versus commonly used natural language processing techniques.
Author bio
Eric Lofgren is an Associate Professor at Washington State University in the Paul G. Allen School for Global Health, where he is a Computational Epidemiologist. He is also a longtime miniatures wargamer, and writes for both Variance Hammer and GoonHammer when the mood strikes.
