For this week’s blog post I made a pretty simple network graph with Google Fusion Tables about The Headless Woman, a short story, by Goncalo M. Tavares. Initially, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the story, so I was pretty surprised when I realized it was slightly scary. As I was reading I just got more irked and scared, but it was really interesting because of that very reason.
The story is about a mother who lost her head. She was decapitated by her husband, apparently because “He wanted more room in bed.” The mother is struggling to find her children, as she is in a labyrinth. She can not see because she does not have her head, so all she can do is use a trail of her blood to have some sort of direction. Eventually, the children find her, but they end up splitting up again to find the mothers head. The story ends with all three boys attempting to find the mothers body again (after the head they find fails to recognize the children). They find the mother again, which then they signal by screaming, however the oldest can not scream. It is a pretty eerie story, but I found the relationships in the story to be particularly interesting.
The story in its entirety only mentions 5 characters. The three sons, the mother and the father. The father was barely mentioned, and the relationship between the mother and the sons seemed pretty straight forward. In creating the diagram, I couldn’t find many ways to make an intricate design, as the relationships were pretty straight forward as to who knew who. The network graph can illuminate plenty of connections in stories and in datasets in general, however, I did notice a lot of limitations to the graph. It’s really cool to see the strengths of certain relationships as well as seeing who has the most connections, however it is impossible to display the evolution of certain characters’ relationships with each other. Based on events, or circumstances, relationships can change and the network diagram is really hard to adjust to fit these changes. You also truly can never say whose relationships to whom are stronger unless you actually know the relationship. Furthermore, if there is a large dataset, I don’t know if this would be the most efficient way to manage and understand relationships.
Despite these limitations, the network graph is still a very useful and helpful function with numerous modes of helping a data project. I’m really fascinated to see what kind of role the Google Fusion Tables will bring to our final project.
Link for the Network Diagram: https://fusiontables.google.com/embedviz?containerId=googft-gviz-canvas&viz=GVIZ&t=GRAPH&gc=true&gd=false&sdb=1&rmax=100000&uiversion=2&q=select+col0%2C+col1+from+1QFNPKR30676vgNrYgRgQRSo_VNN8lL6ZasR-7Z6b&qrs=+where+col0+%3E%3D+&qre=+and+col0+%3C%3D+&qe=&state=%7B%22ps%22%3A%221_0_-7_8_1_v_b_2_-o_-p_3_-t_13_%22%2C%22cx%22%3A-22.78612862509575%2C%22cy%22%3A7.3220995863824285%2C%22sw%22%3A614.5838621689452%2C%22sh%22%3A255.58697900907373%2C%22z%22%3A2.3408064885589512%7D&gco_forceIFrame=true&gco_hasLabelsColumn=true&width=500&height=300
Hi,
Thanks for providing some background to the short story––it does sound pretty scary! Also, I agree with you that it would be great to show how the relationships have changed over time. I had a tough time with the fact that so many details about the connections in the story cannot be reflected well in the graph.
Hi,
That sounds like a pretty scary yet captivating story! I agree that there are a lot of limitations in the network graph despite showing a clear and straightfoward relationships between the characters. Aside from that, the graph revealed nearly nothing regarding the relationships of the characters in the story.
Hi! I also did my blog post on this story! I agree that making this chart was really straightforward, and because there weren’t too many characters in the story, it seems very…. empty? I thought it would be cool if we could alter the length of the grey lines to show how close each son was to the mom, but I don’t think this program allows us to!