Marvel Universe Social Network Marvel Universe Social Network Dataset

About the Marvel Universe

Marvel Comics, originally called Timely Comics Inc., had been publishing comic books for decades. The name "Golden Age of Comics" was given due to the popularity of these books in the first few years, before a period of declining interest in superhero stories due to the impact of the world wars. In 1961, Marvel relaunched its superhero comic book publishing line. This new era ushered in the so-calledMarvel Comics Era. Characters created during this period, such as Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, as well as characters created during the Golden Age, such as Captain America, have become globally famous and cultural icons over the decades. Marvel's characters have since recovered further in popularity thanks to the release of several recent films that recreated the comic book stories using spectacular modern special effects. Today, the comic book content can be accessed through digital platforms created by Marvel, which can be accessed on a monthly or yearly subscription basis.

content

This dataset contains heroes and comics and the relationship between them. The dataset is divided into three files:

1. Nodes.csv: Contains two columns (node, type), indicating the name and type of the node (comic, hero).
2. Edges.csv: Contains two columns (hero, comic) indicating in which comic the hero appears.
3. Hero-edge.csv: Contains a network of heroes that appear together in the comics. This file was originally taken from http://syntagmatic.github.io/exposedata/marvel/

Past Research (Acknowledgements)

The Marvel Comics Character Collaboration Graph was originally constructed by Cesc Rosselló, Ricardo Alberich, and Joe Miro at the University of the Balearic Islands. They compared the characteristics of this universe to real-world collaboration networks, such as the Hollywood network, or networks created by scientists who co-authored a research paper. Their original source can be found atHereFound. With this dataset, the authors published a paper titled:The Marvel Universe almost looks like a real-life social network” paper.