I read the Martians Claim Canada by Margaret Atwood on the Granata.com short story site. I tried to organize this network graph by which character prompted another character to speak, but I do not think this fairly illuminates the relationship of the characters to each other. The first three characters are the Martians who descend onto Canada looking for New York City and clearly are apart of one network because they know each other and have travelled together. They meet a Mushroom character when they land in Canada . The Mushroom tells them where they are and describes human activity to them, so in this conversation, they are each prompting each other at different points in the conversation to say something. Thus, the metric by which this network graph is constructed just reflects that of any normal conversation and cannot speak to different situational aspects of this interaction, including nature of the Mushroom’s speech or the basic background differences of each character. I think there would have been a lot of different approaches to creating this network graph had there been multiple scenes/settings in which these characters interact, however, this short story is based on a singular interaction between these four characters.
This network is limited because it cannot tell a viewer how well each character knows each other, for how long, or what the nature of their relationship is; I think to accurately portray the nature of these relationships, more than one network would be needed. Alternatively, there could be different approaches to measure what constitutes an edge/node.
Here is a photo of the network graph I created on Google Fusion Tables and the link can be found here!
Love this analysis! Interesting to see how everyone is connected to each other, and I agree. It is hard to tell the depth of the relationships and how well someone actually knows each other. Although it appears equal weight for each node it may not be so in actuality. Great job pointing that out!
This story seems FREAKY! I think it’s very interesting as mentioned above that each node seems to have equal weight with one another. This might not be the best way to see who knows each other best for this story, but overall I think it’s a great way to see basic relations with one another. Awesome job!
Haha, I also agree. Especially for short stories, many omit the explanation or description of the characters, which perplexes us as much as we get to wonder about what comes next. I think it is interesting for a mushroom to show up all of a sudden as a main character to interact with human beings.