Digital 2

Lovecraft and his Literary Network

This graph is based on the John Hay Library’s H. P. Lovecraft Collection. Analyzing metadata from over eight thousand letters, the graph represents each of Lovecraft’s most prominent correspondents as a node in his literary network. The bigger and brighter the node, the stronger that person’s connection to the network as a whole. Lovecraft’s node is massive – hardly surprising given that most of the letters in the collection are either to him or from him. But other writers of weird tales make cameos as well: Donald Wandrei, R. H. Barlow, and August Derleth are the next three largest nodes. Click any node to visit the corresponding Wikipedia page (if one exists).

The curved lines (or what network analysts call edges) are weighted to reflect the strength of the connection between each pair of nodes, based on the size of their correspondence archived at the Hay. For example, the edge between Lovecraft and his aunt, Lillian D. Clark, is one of the strongest even though Clark’s own node is relatively small – that is, weakly tied to the rest of the network.

The shape of the network is the result of a force-directed graph drawing algorithm designed by Yifan Hu. Vastly simplified, the algorithm models all the nodes as if they were physical objects subject to laws of attraction and repulsion. The nodes settle into a distribution that minimizes the energy of the system and maximizes symmetry – in other words, a graph that looks a little like Azathoth in space.