Decoding ‘Game of Thrones’ by way of data science

With the final season of the television series ‘Game of Thrones’ upon us it is a good opportunity to take a closer look at the books that the series is based on. We will discover how a numerical processing of the books can help us reveal patterns that lie hidden in ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’.

How does one begin to objectively measure a book? Isn’t it all about the subjective experience in the mind of the reader? Indeed, there are many ways of how literary critics have tried to capture and communicate the essence and measure of value of a book. A book, along with other forms of art, is often valued to the extent which it can give us new and nuanced insights into our own human experience. A fantasy novel series such as ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ sets the story in a more boundless landscape allowing even more freedom to explore the hopes and fears that lies within us all.

However, this article is not a literary critics review, but rather a data science exploration. This numerical exploration will form a stepping stone into a follow-up article where we will see how machine learning can construct different non-deterministic representations of the books. Are there patterns that can predict future events in the books and television series? Can novelist and screenwriters of the future use artificial intelligence to generate new material, enabling a book to be written in weeks instead of years? Martin’s last published novel, ‘A Dance With Dragons’, took six years to write, having HBOs television series outpace the books already by season six. But now we are running ahead of ourselves! This article covers concepts from natural language processing. Natural language processing is an interdisciplinary field which aims to process large amounts of natural language data using computer programming.

Note that the books published to date approximately corresponds to season one through six of the television series but with a slightly different chronology. Assuming that you are about to view the final season of the television series or have read the five books published so far, you can go ahead and read this article without any further spoiler warnings. The rest: you have been warned!

Full article >>>