A content-based social network study of evliyâ çelebi's seyahatnâme-bitlis section

Evliyâ Çelebi, an Ottoman writer, scholar and world traveler, visited most of the territories and also some of the neighboring countries of the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. He took notes about his trips and wrote a 10-volume book called Seyahatnâme (Book of Travels). In this paper, we present two methods for constructing social networks by using textual data and apply it to Seyahatnâme-Bitlis Section from book IV. The first social network construction method is based on proximity of co-occurence of names. The second method is based on 2-pair associations obtained by association rule mining by using sliding text blocks as transactions. The social networks obtained by these two methods are validated using a Monte Carlo approach by comparing them with the social network created by a scholar-historian. © 2012 Springer-Verlag London Limited.