  Human sciences have traditionally relied on human reasoning and intelligence
to infer knowledge from a wide range of sources, such as oral and written
narrations, reports, and traditions. Here we develop an extension of classical
social network analysis approaches to incorporate the concept of meaning in
each actor, as a mean to quantify and infer further knowledge from the original
source of the network. This extension is based on a new affinity function, the
semantic affinity, that establishes fuzzy-like relationships between the
different actors in the network, using combinations of affinity functions. We
also propose a new heuristic algorithm based on the shortest capacity problem
to compute this affinity function. We use these concept of meaning and semantic
affinity to analyze and compare the gods and heroes from three different
classical mythologies: Greek, Celtic and Nordic. We study the relationships of
each individual mythology and those of common structure that is formed when we
fuse the three of them. We show a strong connection between the Celtic and
Nordic gods and that Greeks put more emphasis on heroic characters rather than
deities. Our approach provides a technique to highlight and quantify important
relationships in the original domain of the network not deducible from its
structural properties.
