Carmen Maria Machado’s fictional short story, The Husband Stitch, is a first person narrative about a woman who wears a ribbon around her neck to keep her neck in place and connected to the rest of her body. I was interested in examining the relationships among the characters of the narrative and their actions. I created an edge list with three columns focusing on subjects and verb throughout the story. The first column, Source, includes the character name or pronoun. The second column, Target, includes the verb attributed to the given row in Source. The third column, Weight, counts the number of times the same combination of Target and Source appeared in the story.
The Husband Stitch Google Fusion Network Graph
The character Sources (I, you, we, she, he, mother, father, boy, girl, woman, man, women, boyfriend, girlfriend, son, baby, doctor, witches, killer, murderer, teacher, pig) are the blue nodes, and the verb Targets are the orange nodes.
The resulting Google Fusion network graph reveals that the most active characters are referred to by I, she, he, we, and you. The most commonly used verbs don’t reveal as much about the characters (“have,” “can,” “was”) . It’s interesting to see that more specific verbs such as “proposed” are limited to an individual (he), where as other more general verbs such as “can” are shared by more characters (I, you, he, woman). Certain verbs connect characters together, and reveal their similar behaviors. For example, “we” and “mother” are connected by “making.”
There are several limitations of this network graph. One flaw in the graph is that the gender pronouns are shared by various characters in the story, making the connecting verb nodes difficult to attribute to specific characters (i.e. she could be mother/girl/another female; he could be father/boy/another male). Another limitation is that the graph does not show the order or context in which the subject-verb relationships appeared throughout the narrative. The timeline of character appearances throughout the story could show which characters are more tangential (appear in a couple consecutive paragraphs) vs central characters (appear scattered across the narrative).
Your fusion table is very robust! I really like that you dissected your story story and categorized the different verbs I order to examine relationships. That’s a very unique way of approaching a standard story!