I created my network analysis on the characters of the short story, “First Semester” by Rachel B. Glaser and John Maradik, published online October 31st, 2016 in the Granta 136: Legacies of Love. The story focuses primarily on Sarah, who is experiencing her first semester of college and the whirlwinds of friendships, love, and campus legends. The network analysis therefore, is centered around her relationships, based upon conversations or repeated interactions with that person. To create the chart, I had two columns for character name, and the character in relation.
There were many characters involved as the protagonist progresses through her semester in college and this network analysis graph helps illustrate all the connections. The network analysis, however, is limiting because there were many random groups of people she met that I had trouble incorporating into the graph. Additionally, the network treats all the connections equally and it is difficult to gauge how important the characters are too the story.
For example, Sarah has fairly limited interactions with her Mom, Dad, and little brother, particularly in just one scene. However, she has multiple and crucial interactions with Colin and David, who contribute the most to the plot and yet, there are equally represented in the graph.
I really liked your graph and your analysis. I definitely agree that this sort of network graph is limiting in the sense that we are unable to weight the significance of different relationships in the stories or characterize the nature of the relationships. It would be interesting if there was a program that allowed us to weight how many interactions characters had with one another.