Cross-posted on Soapboxing

I can't find an example of this right now, but I've been lured in the past by facebook apps that generate maps of my social network, producing these spidery images of all the connections between the people I am connected to; big hoops of family, school friends, work friends, out to strange outliers who are unconnected to any other person I know. These maps look a lot like the art produced by Mark Lombardi, who is a "neo-conceptional artist"  - wiki's phrasing - whose mapping of the relationships between government, business, and fraud are both beautiful and chilling. 

(I'm kind of freaking out here because I didn't know that Lombardi killed himself in 2000, and his pre-9/11 documentation of the relationship between the Bush, bin Laden, and al Saud families, for example, ended up being the subject of FBI investigation after the fact. Jesus. Deploy the tin foil, friends.)

Anyway, on a less ominous note, some statisticians have created relationship maps for a bunch of ye olde narratives --  the Sagas, Beowulf, the Iliad, and the Irish Táin Bó Cuailnge --and found that the ones that are purported to be based in real events produce relationship maps that look a lot more like modern social networks that the ones understood to be fictional. Observe:

The one on the left is a relationship map for the Sagas, the right is from the Táin. The latter is understood to be fictional, and the former based on fact. You can see how one has the messy, lived structure of a social network, and the other has the artificial importance of a single protagonist.

Whoa. 

It would be seriously freaking interesting if someone would turn this kind of statistical analysis of social structures in, say, the book of Exodus, the Gospels, or the Rigveda.