Gephi

Image credit: Gephi network of character co-mentions in the scholarship related to the Orlando furioso as captured in bigrams in Constellate. Created by Prof. Hall.

Below are graphs of people with degree 0 nodes removed. The left graph shows edges in Canti 1 to 34, and the right graph shows edges in Canti 35 to 46. As clearly shown, there are several small, highly clustered communities which appear in the last 12 canti.

Below is a screenshot of the Gephi interface, showing what can likely be thought of as the protagonists in Orlando Furioso. We keep only people with degree greater or equal to 81 in our people-people graph. The protagonists form a highly clustered network, with Bradamante and Ruggiero having by far the strongest connection.

Gender Analysis Across all 46 Canti

It is noteworthy that, as a group, the women are the minority compared to the men, based on number of characters, as seen here:

Fig. 2. Left: Modularity class coloured network for male characters; Right: Modularity class coloured for female characters 

For the male characters graph on the left, there were communities which were not close to the core of the network at a larger scale than with the female characters graph, which suggests that the male characters are more plentiful not only in connected nodes but unconnected nodes. The female character graph to the right also faintly shows a circle of unconnected dots at a vast distance from the center, resulting in the vastly zoomed out modularity class views above. In order to get more clarity on who the secluded communities in the male characters network are, we zoomed into the red box squared community from the left image in Figure 2, to produce Figure 3.

Fig. 3. Zoomed out view from the left graph from figure 2: Modularity class coloured network for male characters

This network community of male characters, separate from any other characters connected to the center characters is from the final canto XLVI depicting the bridal ceremony and murder of Rodomonte, summarized by translator Kline in these Poetry in Translation headings.

Since we don't have an equally dense secluded female community, we zoomed into a network comminity with one node connection to the center, as seen in Figure 4:

Fig. 5. Left: Zoomed out view from the right graph from figure 2: Modularity class coloured network for female characters; Right: The names from the zoomed out red rectangle

This community is also from the final canto XLVI, showing that female characters connected to Ricciarda communicate less and with fewer people than male characters connected to Palladio as seen in Figure 3.

Overall, the one consistent observation on the topic of gender in Orlando furioso is that there are fewer female characters who interact less often between each other.