Matthias Funk

The Social Network Induced by the Common Knowledge of Proverbs

In a series of interviews, we collected a heterogeneous set of several million relations of positive and negative knowledge that a group of thousands of people has about a set of circa twenty-two thousand Portuguese Proverbs. One of the interesting questions was if we could find a minimum base of proverbs as an indicator to decide from which place a person came due to their specific profile of proverbial knowledge. Before trying this challenge, we will analyse, in this article, the probability of achieving such an idea by trying to find out if a homomorphism between the proverbial knowledge and the geographical location of a person could exist.To solve this question, we chose an approach based on the analysis of social networks where the broadcast of oral culture, at least historically, could be interpreted as a trace of direct social contact between some of their users. We found, in the present pilot-project based on small data sets, that there are clusters where the neighbourhood relation inducted by the minimum Hamming Distance could be a reflex of the geographical distribution and of some migration flux of the population.