Graphs Maps Trees

In this groundbreaking book, Franco Moretti argues that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. In place of the traditionally selective literary canon of a few hundred texts, Moretti offers charts, maps and time lines, developing the idea of "distant reading" into a full-blown experiment in literary historiography, in which the canon disappears into the larger literary system. Charting entire genres-the epistolary, the gothic, and the historical novel-as well as the literary output of countries such as Japan, Italy, Spain, and Nigeria, he shows how literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed and how the concept of aesthetic form can be radically redefined.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD How does a literary historian end up thinking in terms of z-scores, principal component analysis, and clustering coefficients? The essays in Distant Reading led to a new and often contested paradigm of literary analysis. In presenting them here Franco Moretti reconstructs his intellectual trajectory, the theoretical influences over his work, and explores the polemics that have often developed around his positions. From the evolutionary model of “Modern European Literature,” through the geo-cultural insights of “Conjectures of World Literature” and “Planet Hollywood,” to the quantitative findings of “Style, inc.” and the abstract patterns of “Network Theory, Plot Analysis,” the book follows two decades of conceptual development, organizing them around the metaphor of “distant reading,” that has come to define—well beyond the wildest expectations of its author—a growing field of unorthodox literary studies.

Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History is one of the most provocative recent works of literary history. The present volume collects generalist and specialist, academic and nonacademic responses by statisticians, philosophers, historians, literary scholars and others. And Moretti’s responses to these responses.

This open access book focuses on the interplay between random walks on planar maps and Koebe’s circle packing theorem. Further topics covered include electric networks, the He–Schramm theorem on infinite circle packings, uniform spanning trees of planar maps, local limits of finite planar maps and the almost sure recurrence of simple random walks on these limits. One of its main goals is to present a self-contained proof that the uniform infinite planar triangulation (UIPT) is almost surely recurrent. Full proofs of all statements are provided. A planar map is a graph that can be drawn in the plane without crossing edges, together with a specification of the cyclic ordering of the edges incident to each vertex. One widely applicable method of drawing planar graphs is given by Koebe’s circle packing theorem (1936). Various geometric properties of these drawings, such as existence of accumulation points and bounds on the radii, encode important probabilistic information, such as the recurrence/transience of simple random walks and connectivity of the uniform spanning forest. This deep connection is especially fruitful to the study of random planar maps. The book is aimed at researchers and graduate students in mathematics and is suitable for a single-semester course; only a basic knowledge of graduate level probability theory is assumed.

Our critically acclaimed bestseller Visual Complexity was the first in-depth examination of the burgeoning field of information visualization. Particularly noteworthy are the numerous historical examples of past efforts to make sense of complex systems of information. In this new companion volume, The Book of Trees, data viz expert Manuel Lima examines the more than eight hundred year history of the tree diagram, from its roots in the illuminated manuscripts of medieval monasteries to its current resurgence as an elegant means of visualization. Lima presents two hundred intricately detailed tree diagram illustrations on a remarkable variety of subjects—from some of the earliest known examples from ancient Mesopotamia to the manuscripts of medieval monasteries to contributions by leading contemporary designers. A timeline of capsule biographies on key figures in the development of the tree diagram rounds out this one-of-a-kind visual compendium.

Originally published in 1989, this is an advanced text and research monograph on groups acting on low-dimensional topological spaces, and for the most part the viewpoint is algebraic. Much of the book occurs at the one-dimensional level, where the topology becomes graph theory. Two-dimensional topics include the characterization of Poincare duality groups and accessibility of almost finitely presented groups. The main three-dimensional topics are the equivariant loop and sphere theorems. The prerequisites grow as the book progresses up the dimensions. A familiarity with group theory is sufficient background for at least the first third of the book, while the later chapters occasionally state without proof and then apply various facts which require knowledge of homological algebra and algebraic topology. This book is essential reading for anyone contemplating working in the subject.

To most graph theorists there are two outstanding landmarks in the history of their subject. One is Euler's solution of the Konigsberg Bridges Problem, dated 1736, and the other is the appearance of Denes Konig's textbook in 1936. "From Konigsberg to Konig's book" sings the poetess, "So runs the graphic tale . . . " 10]. There were earlier books that took note of graph theory. Veb len's Analysis Situs, published in 1931, is about general combinato rial topology. But its first two chapters, on "Linear graphs" and "Two-Dimensional Complexes," are almost exclusively concerned with the territory still explored by graph theorists. Rouse Ball's Mathematical Recreations and Essays told, usually without proofs, of the major graph-theoretical advances ofthe nineteenth century, of the Five Colour Theorem, of Petersen's Theorem on I-factors, and of Cayley's enumerations of trees. It was Rouse Ball's book that kindled my own graph-theoretical enthusiasm. The graph-theoretical papers of Hassler Whitney, published in 1931-1933, would have made an excellent textbook in English had they been collected and published as such. But the honour of presenting Graph Theory to the mathe matical world as a subject in its own right, with its own textbook, belongs to Denes Konig. Low was the prestige of Graph Theory in the Dirty Thirties. It is still remembered, with resentment now shading into amuse ment, how one mathematician scorned it as "The slums of Topol ogy.""