For this week’s blog post I read The Martians Claim Canada by Margaret Atwood, and made a network graph to serve as an illustration to the character’s connections. The story was about three Martians who had intentions of going to New York to watch a musical, but accidently landed in Canada. Through talking with mushrooms, they establish that they are in the wrong place and in turn claim Canada. I organized the edge list to include all the characters in the story including all three Martians and the mushroom. As seen in the network graph, there was a connection between every character.
The network graph is a good representation of the characters’ connections in “The Martians Claim Canada”. It shows how every character in the short fiction had an interaction with each other. Everybody is connected in some way to each other. This network graph does not seem to have any limitations but I am sure that as we add more characters who haven’t interacted with all the other characters, the graph would become more complex and complicated. A limitation to network graphs being used in this aspect is that there really is no way to specify what type of connection there is between the characters. Certain characters may have a significant relationship to each other while still retaining a connection to others, but there isn’t really a way to specify this. One way to do this would be to color code the nodes but it would still prove to be limited in providing that kind of information to the viewer.
