Uploaded August 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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What do fantasy fiction and data science have in common? More than you think.

In this talk, I share the story behind one of my favorite personal projects — building a social network map of The Witcher universe. Using simple text processing and network science techniques, I turned thousands of pages from the book series into a visual graph that reveals character connections, central players, and hidden story clusters.

📖 This project is featured in my new book Connecting the Dots, where I explore how network science helps us understand complex systems — from corporate organizations to pop culture.

💡 What you'll learn in this talk:

How to build a character network from unstructured text

Why sentence proximity can be used as a proxy for interaction

What clusters in the network reveal about storylines

How these same techniques apply in business, HR, and recommendation systems

Whether you're a fan of The Witcher, a data scientist, or just curious how algorithms can decode stories — you're in the right place.