The Social Network of the Holy Land

Abstract

The so-called Holiness Code (Leviticus 17–26) describes the land (אֶרֶץ) almost as a human being. In biblical scholarship on this law-text, the land has often been explained as an independent agent and more powerful than even the human beings that are present in the text. This paper will use social network analysis to test these conclusions and provide a more detailed account of the role of the land. The paper sets out to develop a social network model of the Holiness Code by including all interactions among human/divine participants and physical space. The paper then explores how human/divine participants relate to space, and it is shown that the participant roles are closely connected to access to space. Afterwards, the social role of the land is scrutinized by exploring each of its relationships, and by conducting a cluster analysis to understand the structural properties of the network. It is shown that the land is not as central and agentive as is usually thought but, rather, that the land plays a secondary role as a vulnerable character in need of protection. The paper is concluded by reflections on the potential of social network analysis for understanding character roles in literature.

1. Introduction

In this paper, I shall discuss the potential of social network analysis (SNA) for delineating the roles of literary characters in biblical literature. I shall focus my inquiry on the land (אֶרֶץ) in the so-called Holiness Code (Lev 17–26) because, as several biblical scholars have noted, the land plays a curious role within this complex and theologically intricate piece of literature. For one thing, the land is much more frequently mentioned in those chapters than in the preceding chapters of Leviticus. Esias E. Meyer (2015, p. 436) mentions 67 occurrences of אֶרֶץ in Lev 17–26, counting only lexemes. In addition, according to my own counts, the land is referred to at least 26 times by pronominal suffixes. Even more so, the land takes on a peculiar role and seems to be personified as a human being (Barbiero 2002, p. 240; Hieke 2014, p. 1095). In Meyer’s study of the land in the Holiness Code, he analyses all cases where the land occurs as a grammatical subject: The land can become defiled (18:25, 27), spit out (18:25, 28), prostitute herself (19:29), rest (25:2; 26:34, 35), give agricultural produce (25:19; 26:4, 20), take pleasure (26:34, 43), and devour its inhabitants (26:38). These observations led Meyer to conclude that “in the Holiness Code אֶרֶץ is perhaps not the primary subject but at least a crucial one, second apparently only to YHWH” (Meyer 2015, p. 434). A similar conclusion was reached by Jan Joosten in his study of the people and land in the Holiness Code. According to him, the land is an “independent agent” and is “presented as an animate being far more powerful than its inhabitants” (Joosten 1996, pp. 152–53).

As has already been hinted at, the land is referred to almost 100 times during the ten chapters of the Holiness Code, if not more. This number is already high if we want to deduce a particular role from the description of the land in those occurrences. It is indeed possible to read all descriptions of the land—as well as reading the Holiness Code itself—but the reader will easily be led astray by the details of the text and will struggle to identify a more abstract, encompassing role. When we talk about frequencies, it is important to note that the Holiness Code contains 4092 individual linguistic references according to a participant-tracking analysis by Eep Talstra (2018). This fact alone should caution us against jumping too quickly to the conclusion that the land is the second most important participant in the Holiness Code.

Another complication concerning role delineation is that the participants are embedded in a network with other participants. It is common for traditional approaches within biblical scholarship to describe a literary character in relation to one or two other participants, at best, or as if it were an isolated entity. But social roles are not intrinsic values but are negotiated through social interaction (Donati 2017; Emirbayer 1997; Groenewegen et al. 2017). Therefore, the social network is a crucial component in role description. As regards the land in the Holiness Code, it has usually been analysed in relation to YHWH and its inhabitants. Joosten, for example, has dubbed the land “le tiers significatif”, i.e., the significant third (Joosten 2010, pp. 392–94), and Meyer (2015) emphasizes its intermediate role between YHWH and the people.

Social network analysis remedies both issues raised thus far: frequency and embeddedness. The method was developed to explore and predict behaviour in social networks, and computational applications of SNA allow for large-scale datasets. When applying SNA to the study of the land in the Holiness Code, as I shall do in this paper, several interesting observations arise: (1) the land is not among the main characters of the law-text; (2) the land is generally not agentive but appears to be portrayed as vulnerable and in need for protection. I shall discuss the implications of these observations at the end of this paper after, firstly, introducing the SNA model and the dataset developed for this study and, secondly, using network tools and statistical measures to scrutinize the role of the land.

2. Methodology

2.1. Social Network Analysis and the Study of Literature

Although social network analysis is mainly associated with real-world social structures, e.g., the social ties of the Medici family in Renaissance Florence (Padgett and Ansell 1993), SNA has also been applied to the study of literature.1 Since narratives consist of people in interaction, SNA can be used to detect smaller communities of literary characters in a book (Newman and Girvan 2004) and to scrutinize the narrative roles of individual literary characters with respect to centrality, authority, and structural hubs (Agarwal et al. 2012). In relation to biblical studies, Steven E. Massey (2016) has explored the role of Moses in the Pentateuch, while Chebineh Che (2017) has combined SNA with a text-syntactic and literary analysis of Gen 27–28. The present study adapts a social network model developed for the Holiness Code in Lev 17–26 (Højgaard 2024) to be introduced below.

(Social) networks consist essentially of nodes and edges. Nodes can represent almost any entity, but in social networks, they usually denote persons or groups. Edges represent the ties or interactions among the nodes. Usually, edges correspond to one type of relationship or interaction, e.g., marriage ties as in the Medici network or speech in Che’s Genesis network (see also Moretti 2011). Edges may also simply represent that two literary characters are present in the same chapter of a book or on the same cuneiform tablet, as in Caroline Waerzeggers’s (2014) analysis of Neo- and Late Babylonian archives.

2.2. Social Space

The present work employs an adaptation of Højgaard’s social network analysis of Lev 17–26. Leviticus is a law-text, and chapters 17–26 are often dubbed the Holiness Code because they focus on the holiness of the Israelite society. Despite being a law-text, the law is presented in speeches dealing with everyday situations of many different persons. For that reason, the people described in those chapters do, in fact, form a social network.

The major difference between the original network and the one proposed in this paper is that the present one conceptualizes social space as nodes alongside people. This approach is reasonable insofar as people can interact with social space, e.g., Aaron can arrange the golden lampstand of the Tabernacle (Lev 24:3), and the land can spit out its inhabitants (Lev 18:25, 28). I define social space as geographical locations like the land, the camp, and the Tabernacle. Moreover, I include material items that are restricted to a particular space and to which there is restricted access, in this case, most importantly, the golden lampstand and the altars, among others.

2.3. Agency of Space

In the network of Lev 17–26, the edges represent all sorts of interactions realized by Hebrew verbs, including trade, sentiments, translocation, and speech, among others. Moreover, each edge is attributed a weight corresponding to the level of agency implied by or invested in the event. For example, it requires more agency to buy a property (at least, it requires some economical capacity) than to feel angry. With respect to space, geographical locations are also related to agency. For the most part, they are mostly unaffected by the event, e.g., in “[It was me] who was leading you out of Egypt” (Lev 22:33), where “Egypt” is the point of departure and not affected by the translocation taking place between the subject and the object. However, when Aaron arranges the lampstand (24:3), or the land spits out its inhabitants (18:25, 28), the lampstand and the land are part of the transaction, albeit in different ways. The lampstand is affected, while the land itself instigates an event that affects its inhabitants.

Based on the assumption that various events imply different degrees of agency, each event (=edge) of the dataset was weighted according to a scale of agency ranging from Patient (low agency) to Agent (high agency) with several steps in between, each corresponding to a semantic role with a particular level of agency (see

Table 1. Semantic roles and agency scores.

Semantic Role	Agency Score
Agent	5
Force	4
Affected Agent	3
Instrument	2
Frustrative	1
Neutral	0
Volitional Undergoer	−1
Patient	−2

). This approach helps normalize the otherwise disparate events because a mean agency score can be computed across various interactions between two nodes.

The semantic roles and their implied agency are inspired by Åshild Næss (2007), who defined Force as relating to physical, inhuman forces. In one sense, therefore, it would be reasonable to consider agentive events involving physical space (e.g., the land spitting out its inhabitants) as implying a Force rather than an Agent, because Agents are reserved for volitional (human) entities. On the other hand, it may be the whole point of the law-text to portray the land similar to a volitional being, since it uses verbs that are otherwise restricted to human beings. For that reason, I decided to annotate the physical space entities as if they were human beings.

3. Results

The social network of Lev 17–26 consists of 605 edges that connect 60 persons and 27 places (see Figure 1). It is a complex network with directed (i.e., events are conceptualized as originating with an actor towards an undergoer) and multiple ties (i.e., there can be more than one edge between a pair of nodes). What can be seen from the graph is that it consists of a few highly central participants, including YHWH, the Israelites, the sojourner, the individually addressed Israelite (called 2MSg), and Moses.2 The addition of social space does not significantly affect the overall impression of the network, the interpretation of which can be found in Højgaard (2024). What will interest us, however, is how the society implied by this network is organized around space, and particularly, how the land is portrayed by this network. We shall look at these two topics in turn.

3.1. Land Access

To analyse the spatial organization of society, the social network is transformed into a two-mode network selecting only those human participants that are connected to places (see Figure 2).3

Several things are readily noticeable. First, Aaron, the high priest, has unique access to the sacred space inhabited by the golden lamp stand and the curtain guarding the inner sanctum. Only he and his sons have access to the holy place, which is an unidentified sacred space within the temple compound (Lev 24:9). Moses has exclusive access to the golden table in the outer sanctum because it is he who is to bake the bread for the table (24:5–7). The priests are clearly gatekeepers to the holy space, but it is interesting to see that the network is not centralized around the priests and the temple as would be expected from a priestly text like Leviticus. On the contrary, the important locations for this network in terms of centrality are the land, the altar, and the tent of meeting, all of which are accessible to the Israelites who are the structurally most important participants, together with YHWH (see degree centrality and betweenness scores in Figure 3).4 The tent of meeting and the altar are certainly within the domain of the priests, and they are described as approaching it (21:23), putting sacrifices upon it (22:22), and tossing blood upon it (17:6). Nevertheless, just like the priests, the Israelites can put sacrifices upon the altar (22:22) if we accept that this particular law is spoken to both priests and laypeople (see 22:18).

The tent of meeting is almost equally central because it is affected by a number of different people who are all central in this network (see Figure 4a). YHWH, Aaron, and the Israelites are highly embedded in the network, and their interactions with the tent of meeting bring the latter near the core of the network. Just like the tent of meeting is the physical centre of the Israelite camp, the tent of meeting occupies a central position in the social life of the people according to the network model. If we look more closely at the data—and particularly the interactions and their accompanying agency scores—it becomes clear that the tent of meeting is, for the most part, not portrayed as a neutral space (see Figure 4b). It is presented as given by YHWH (26:11) and a place to which an Israelite can bring his gifts (17:4). But the majority of the transactions recorded deal with the risk of ritual defilement. The sojourner and an Israelite are described as defiling the tent of meeting by sacrificing their children to Moloch (20:3), and Aaron is warned against defiling it (21:12, 23). Finally, the Israelites only have two interactions with the tent of meeting, both being an exhortation to fear YHWH’s sanctuary (19:30; 26:2). The tent of meeting, therefore, is an ambiguous space in the middle of the Israelite society and in constant threat of defilement.

Finally, it is worth noting the human participants not present or peripheral in the network. The most striking group is the women, who are mentioned several times throughout the text but barely in relation to space. In the two-mode network of people and space (Figure 2), the priest’s daughter is the only woman represented (22:13). Most women are referred to only in relation to the individually addressed Israelite (2MSg), e.g., “your wife” or “your aunt”, and their access to the social community and space is via 2MSg.

2MSg himself is peripheral in the two-mode network. The distinction between 2MSg and Israelites is somewhat arbitrary because both nodes refer to Israelites, yet in different grammatical numbers. Nevertheless, it has been shown that the variation between individual and plural address to the Israelites in this law-text carries a semantic and rhetorical meaning (Højgaard 2024; Joosten 1997). The Israelites are addressed in the plural in matters of national and foreign affairs, the relation to YHWH, and the covenant. By contrast, the Israelites are addressed in the singular in domestic matters and personal relationships with family members, the poor, and others. The two-mode network shows the same distribution. 2MSg is related only to the field and the vineyard, while the Israelites are related to the land, the land of the enemies, Egypt, the tent of meeting and its entrance, the altar, the field, the town, the village, the ground, the hut, and outside the camp.

The brother, who is referred to frequently in the text as “your brother” but also “your fellow” and “your countryman”, is surprisingly peripheral. His only connection to the two-mode network is via the property to which he may return in the jubilee year (25:41). It has previously been shown that the brother represents a fellow, poor Israelite at the margins of society in risk of sliding even further away from society (Højgaard 2023). The inclusion of space in the representation of the brother illustrates even clearer that his access to the community is via the property he is doomed to lose if his fellows turn their back on him and ignore the call for a jubilee year.

3.2. Personified Land

The land has a particularly interesting role in the social network because it scores high in centrality and betweenness and because it often appears with human traits. The complexity of the land and its relationships is readily apparent in Figure 5a. It is related to some of the most important participants of the network, including YHWH, the Israelites, the priests (Aaron and the sons of Aaron), and the sojourner. This is the reason that the land scores high in betweenness and PageRank (Figure 3). Figure 5b shows the mean agency scores of the land with respect to its neighbours. The vertical black bars in the plot represent the confidence intervals (95%). Given the few data points, the confidence intervals are not statistically significant, but they are provided here to illustrate the variation. For example, the confidence interval of the mean agency score for the foreign nations is large because there are only four interactions, two of them referring to the land “vomiting out” the inhabitants of the land (=the foreign nations in this model) and “spitting them out” (Lev 18:25, 28). Those interactions assume high agency on behalf of the land. The other two interactions involve the foreign nations being “appalled” over the land (26:32) and settling down in it (26:32), hence portraying the land as inagentive.

The land has most of its interactions with the Israelites. Overall, the mean agency is −0.077. This agency score is somewhat artificially low, as I will explain below.

A number of interactions portray the land neutrally as the place in which the Israelites arrive (19:23; 23:10; 25:2), inherit (20:24), and live (20:22; 26:35). It is a special concern and the ultimate ideal of the lawgiver that the Israelites may live “safely” לָבֶטַח in the land in that the land takes good care of its inhabitants by providing abundant yields of agricultural produce (25:19; 26:5). The requirement is the Israelites’ unwavering commitment to YHWH’s decrees and laws (25:18). To this extent, therefore, it is true that there is a triangular relationship between the land, its inhabitants, and YHWH. The behaviour of the land reflects the relationship between the Israelites and YHWH, and their faithfulness or treachery is reflected in how they experience the land.

The land has certain privileges, most importantly during the year of the jubilee (Lev 25). In that year, the Israelites have to blow the ram’s horn in the land (25:9) and proclaim “liberty” דְּרֹור for the inhabitants in the land, but more importantly, they have to provide “redemption” גְּאֻלָּה for the land (25:24), that is, the land is effectively portrayed as a recipient or beneficiary of redemption. It is really the land—along with its inhabitants—that is kept bondage if well-fed Israelites occupy the land and deny fellow, poor citizens their return to their ancestral properties. The land is kept bondage, too, and needs liberation for it to thrive. Moreover, the land is depicted as in constant threat of pollution caused by the Israelites (18:28). For that reason, the Israelites are explicitly prohibited against offering animals that have their testicles bruised, crushed, torn, or cut (22:24). The same prohibition applies to the fellow addressees of this particular law, Aaron and the sons of Aaron, who are in charge of handling the sacrifices. In addition, the Israelites are prohibited from setting up figured stones in the land (26:1).

As mentioned, the mean agency of the land is somewhat artificially low (−0.077). In 18:28 and 20:22, the land is depicted as being capable of “spitting out” its Israelite inhabitants in the same fashion as was carried out to its original inhabitants. This event would imply high agency, but it must be noted that the Israelites are only warned against polluting the land lest they be spitted out by the land. The event, in other words, is negated and not portrayed as ever carried out, and the role of the land is reduced to frustrative, that is, the land is volitional but denied, at least as regards these specific propositions. In chapter 26, when the Israelite exile is described in horrific terms, for some reason, the land is not described as the agent. Rather, it is YHWH himself who punishes the people and foreign nations that carry out the punishment. The land, on the other hand, is depicted as a beneficiary who can finally enjoy its sabbatical rest (26:34, 35, 43).

The relationship between the land and YHWH is rather complex. The land’s mean agency with YHWH is -1, which shows that the land is more often an undergoer of an event than not. Not surprisingly, the land never instigates an event that involves YHWH. Quite the contrary, the land is cast as the place to where YHWH leads the Israelites (18:3; 20:22) and as an object given to the Israelites (20:24; 23:10; 25:2). The complexity arises with the descriptions of YHWH punishing the land for its guilt (18:25) and rendering it desolate (26:32). It is striking that the land is portrayed as guilty. Strictly speaking, it is not punished for the guilt of its inhabitants but for its own guilt: וַתִּטְמָ֣א הָאָ֔רֶץ וָאֶפְקֹ֥ד עֲוֹנָ֖הּ עָלֶ֑יהָ “and the land became unclean, and I punished it for its guilt”, lit. “and I visited its sin upon it” (18:25). The land is thus liable for the immorality of its inhabitants and is punished alongside them. The land, therefore, seems to occupy an intermediate role. From the viewpoint of YHWH, the land is associated with the inhabitants. From the viewpoint of the inhabitants, the land is associated with YHWH because its attitude towards them reflects YHWH’s blessings or curses. It is along these lines that YHWH’s favour towards the land must be seen. YHWH is further described as remembering the land (26:42) as a consequence of the confession of sin made by the exilic remnants of the Israelites. As a matter of fact, the event of remembrance is the land’s most agentive event with respect to YHWH because, in terms of verbal semantics, remembering is a cognitive event that ascribes agency to both the experiencer (YHWH) and stimulus (the land). The experiencer attends to the stimulus, while the stimulus at the same time brings about the mental state of remembrance in the experiencer (Croft 2022, pp. 228–29). In this particular case, we can only guess what stimulates YHWH’s remembrance of the covenant and the land. It may very well be the confession of sin that stirs YHWH’s compassion for his people and their land. In any case, the land clearly has a quality that affects YHWH and causes him to act in a certain way. Elsewhere, YHWH is described as willing to give peace in the land (26:6) and keep wild animals away from the land (26:6) as a sign of his benevolence towards the land and its inhabitants.

The remaining participants are less important for the social characterization of the land. The sojourner is described as living in the land (19:33; 20:2), while the sons of the sojourners are those born in the land (25:45). Finally, the land is described as being abandoned and desolated by a remnant of Israelites after the exile (26:43).

3.3. Structural Role

The role of the land can also be observed by analysing the network with clustering methods in order to identify similar nodes. Similarity can be defined in various ways. First, two nodes are considered semantically similar if they belong to the same neighbourhood because it is assumed that neighbouring nodes affect one another and become increasingly similar. Second, two nodes are considered similar if their structural positions in the network are similar. For example, the role of teachers could be considered similar, although their neighbourhoods (the pupils) differ.

The present analysis uses deep learning to transform the nodes into vectors based on random walks. The network was modelled as a directed and weighted network, with the weight being defined as the mean agency score. The hyperparameters were set to prioritize similarity based on structure rather than proximity. The vectors were partitioned with K-means clustering, resulting in two optimal clusters as displayed in Figure 6. One cluster primarily includes central and well-embedded nodes. The other cluster consists of peripheral nodes. Some nodes in the second cluster appear to occupy a middle position since they are situated near the centre of the network.

MDS was used on the vectors to show node similarity (Figure 7). Not surprisingly, the most remarkable participants of the first cluster are YHWH, the Israelites, and 2MSg. They all hold important roles in the network, both in terms of structure and agency. The land appears in the middle of the plot closest to the widowed/expelled/defiled woman (21:7, 14), the witnesses (24:11, 12, 14), the daughter (19:29; 21:9; 22:13), and Moses (17:1, 2, 8; 18:1, 2; 19:1, 2; 20:1, 2; 21:1, 16, 17, 24; 22:1, 2, 3, 17, 18, 26; 23:1, 2, 9, 10, 23, 24, 26, 33, 34, 44; 24:1, 2, 6, 11, 13, 14, 15, 23; 25:1, 2). Those participants differ in that Moses appears very frequently while the other three occur rarely. In general, the plot shows a gradual dispersion of the nodes, with the largest cluster in the upper right corner being very similar because they appear almost only once or twice as the undergoers of others’ events. The land does not hold an important structural role in the network, largely because its neighbours are directly connected with one another. That means that the cohesion of the network would not decrease significantly if the land were dropped.

4. Discussion

4.1. The Role of the Land

It has been argued that the land is the second most important participant in the Holiness Code, second only to YHWH (Meyer 2015). And biblical scholars have generally considered the personified land of this law-text an agentive and independent character that mediates the relationship between YHWH and the Israelites. The social network analysis of the Holiness Code casts the land in another light. Structurally, the land belongs to a cluster of peripheral participants, although closer to the core participants than most other participants in the periphery. In terms of agency, the land scores low because it is more often an undergoer of others’ initiatives than an instigator itself. The land is presented as a patient of YHWH’s punishments, a beneficiary of liberty proclaimed, but also as a stimulus provoking YHWH’s compassion, and an agent that expels its original inhabitants. The portrayal of the land, therefore, is mixed, but the land is generally presented as less agentive than usually thought.

It has been suggested that one of the main objectives of the Holiness Code was to delimit the agency or power of the addressees of the law, primarily the Israelites and the priests, for the benefit of less powerful people and for the purity of the land (Højgaard 2024). Along the same lines, I would contend that the lawgiver seeks to protect the land against the consequences of illicit ritual practices and oppression of fellow citizens. The land is easily affected by the Israelites’ moral and ritual behaviour, and the agency of the Israelites, therefore, needs to be constrained. The lawgiver has a concern for the land, most clearly visible in his remembrance of the land (26:42), but his primary concern is with the inhabitants who live off the land.

If this portrayal of the land is accepted, it has ramifications for how we imagine the ancient Israelites’ attitude towards the land or, more accurately, how the land was supposed to be viewed in the eyes of the lawgiver. For one thing, the land was a critical source of sustenance (25:20), but it was certainly more than that. It could not be treated merely as a source to be extracted or a territory to be occupied because, positively and negatively, the land would respond to the deeds of its inhabitants and, in due time, reward or punish them. In modern times, it has become more and more clear that the earth is likewise sensitive to how we live. We can no longer ignore the consequences of overconsumption and depletion of the planet’s natural resources. Like the Israelites and their land, humans and the earth are mutually dependent. We depend on the earth for sustenance, but our wellbeing is contingent upon a sustainable use of natural resources. Unlike, of course, our modern worldview, the Holiness Code did not explain the reaction of the land towards its inhabitants in terms of natural causality but within the framework of the covenant. This is the reason that social and ritual ethics are also part of the Holiness Code’s ecosystem.

4.2. The Potential of Social Network Analysis for Literary Analysis

As shown in this paper, social network analysis assists the analysis of literary characters and their roles by providing visualizations and quantitative measures of structural properties. By turning a text into a social network, relationships can be measured in a way that would otherwise be nearly impossible. These measures include degree and betweenness, among others, that offer a quantitative basis for judging the role of the participants. In contrast to human interpreters, the computer is not limited by the size of the dataset but rather benefits from large quantities of data points. Moreover, the use of statistical methods in the context of a social network approach means that the analysis is not based solely on raw numbers but on frequencies in relation to embeddedness. That is, it is not only important how many interactions a participant has but also to whom.

While the human interpreter may get carried away by certain sentences or sections of the text, the computer handles the entire text consistently. This does not imply that the results provided by SNA are objective and indisputable. The conclusions are only as strong as the input data, and many choices have to be made to create a dataset from a text. In this particular case, only clauses with a verb and two participants were included, for example, a verbal clause with a subject and an (oblique) object. This means that much textual information was left out from the outset. Naturally, all interpretations of text involve some reduction and prioritization on the basis of (un)conscious choices made by the interpreter. The benefit of SNA is the conscious reduction of the text into participants and interactions, arguably the most important constituents in the construction of social roles.

Finally, this paper has shown that the roles of literary characters are also constituted by the physical space to which they have access. In future research, the social network could be further expanded by including those material objects that inhabit the physical space of the literary characters.

5. Materials and Methods

The social network analysis was conducted with the Python module NetworkX 3.4.2 (Hagberg et al. 2008), and the graphs were created with Matplotlib 3.10.0 (Hunter 2007) and Seaborn 0.13.2 (Waskom 2021). K-means partitioning and MDS were carried out with Scikit-learn 1.6.1 (Pedregosa et al. 2011).

The feature-based learning of the graph was carried out with PecanPy 2.0.9 (Liu and Krishnan 2021), which is a reimplementation of node2vec (Grover and Leskovec 2016). Node2vec and PecanPy transform network nodes into vectors by performing random walks according to predefined settings. For this study, the best results were achieved with the following settings: p = 5, q = 0.5, workers = 3, dim = 128, num_walks = 100, walk_length = 3, window_size = 5, epochs = 1. High p and low q optimize the algorithm for leaving the network neighbourhood fast, thereby prioritizing structural similarity.