Our Top Ten

By using XQuery, we were able to find the ten most popular characters within our corpus of fables. Popularity was determined by how many times a character appeared within all of the fables, regardless of their actions or dialogue. Even if a character didn't do much within the fable, it was still present at some point and thus played a part. In order of popularity, they are:

  1. Fox
  2. Lion
  3. Man
  4. Wolf
  5. Ass
  6. Dog
  7. Eagle
  8. Sheep
  9. Shepherd
  10. Jupiter

Since we were curious about how certain characters behave, we used XSLT to create a table that shows the character names, the number of times they speak, the number of times their spoken to, the number of actions they complete, and the number of times they are acted upon.

Character Times Present Quotes Times Spoken To Actions Times Acted Upon
Fox 38 27 15 135 35
Lion 35 15 16 112 52
Man 30 24 22 100 29
Wolf 25 21 13 96 27
Ass 24 7 10 114 43
Dog 24 10 11 79 19
Shepherd 13 6 7 37 11
Eagle 12 6 8 46 13
Sheep 12 4 5 13 22
Jupiter 11 6 3 28 19

It is interesting to see that although a character may be present in many fables, that does not always mean they will speak or act more frequently than others.

Below is a matrix we created using XSLT to have a visual representation of interactions between characters. The x-axis is our list of top ten characters, while the y-axis is the list of characters they speak to/act upon.* Each graph has two sides: the left side shows the number of interactions between characters; the right side shows the percent of time those characters interact when they appear together. For example, the fox talks to the wolf only once, but they appear together in three fables.

Matrix of Verbal Interaction

man wolf lion shepherd fox ass dog eagle sheep jupiter lamb mouse bear tortoise ox goat beast frog jackdaw master cock monkey hare boar sea owner bull traveler farmer oak camel fly ape minerva woman hound horse fox fox lion lion man man wolf wolf ass ass dog dog eagle eagle sheep sheep shepherd shepherd jupiter jupiter 1 50 2 100 5 50 5 18.5 1 50 1 100 1 33.3 1 33.3 1 100 1 33.3 1 50 5 50 1 33.3 1 33.3 1 25 1 100 1 33.3 1 100 3 20 1 50 9 37.5 1 100 3 100 2 100 1 100 1 33.3 5 100 3 75 2 66.6 2 33.3 2 66.6 1 100 4 19 1 33.3 2 8.3 2 100 2 66.6 1 100 1 33.3 1 25 1 100 1 33.3 1 100 3 30 1 16.6 1 25 1 100 1 7.7 1 20 1 100

*The characters on the x-axis are only characters that appear two or more times in the collection. We chose to do this because the characters that only appear once would only yield 0% or 100% for the right side of the table, and wouldn't give us much more insight to the behaviors of the Top Ten.