Title Centrality measures as a signature of roles in Rousseau ’ s Les Confessions

We investigate how a selection of centrality measures can be used to differentiate roles of characters in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s autobiography Les Confessions. We define methods to build automatically a network of characters, based on their co-occurrences. In the resulting network, each character of the novel is a node connected to other nodes representing other characters. We rank these with four centrality measures and find different ordering depending on the measures. We highlight how characters with high betweenness centrality tend to play positive role in the narration as they act as important mediators and facilitators of Rousseau’s social life. On the contrary, we show that characters with high eigenvector centrality form a cluster of interchangeable figures, acting in practice like a “meta-character”, a crowd that conspires against Rousseau. Although we cannot yet generalise these findings to other work, we argue that these preliminary results motivate further research based on well-chosen centrality measures in digital literary studies.