The short story that I focused on was “The Martians Claim Canada” in which three Martians, by means of communicating with a Canadian mushroom, claim Canada for non-nefarious musical purposes. The four characters that I created a connection between are Martian #1, Martian #2, Martian #3, and the mushroom (Amanita muscaria). I examined the short story for which of these characters interact with one another, and which ones are in the same scene. Then, I created the Google Fusion Table to explain the connection between the characters. The Google Fusion Table and the graphic chart are below:
The chart highlights the relationship between the four characters, and the dependency on their collaboration for the narrative to take place. If the three Martians did not crash land in the part of Canada with these communicative mushrooms, they would not have been able to claim Canada. The limitations of this chart are the number of interactions between the characters. For example, although it is known that all four characters communicate, the chart does not show which Martian communicates more with the mushroom, and which Martians communicate more with each other. All that can be seen is that all four, at some point in the narrative, appear in the same scene in the short story.
Hi! This post was very easy to read, but the graph is a little small, so it’s a little hard to see who appears in the same scene.
Good job on explaining the limitations of the Google Fusion Graph! It is true that not much can be interpreted from just looking at the graph. However, I believe there is a function that allows you to add weights to different relationships to emphasize them!
This is really interesting! I read the same short story and did a different analysis of connections and I like the way you thought of connecting the characters based on who they appear with each scene. Very cool!