For this week’s blog post, I decided to look at the story “Kashmir’s Forever Wars” by Basharat Peer. This story looks at the India-Pakistan War in Kashmir and the impact it has had on families in Kashmir. The narrator travels throughout the region and meets with families who have had family members join the militants. The narrator specifically explores the motivations and reasons behind people joining the militants and how it has impacted the communities in which they lived.
I chose to make a network graph with edges between characters who appear in the same scene. This network graph helps illuminate several interesting things. Not surprisingly, the narrator is the central character of the story connecting all the other characters. This graph also illuminates which groups of characters tend to interact with one another. Just by looking at this network graph, someone who has not read the story could still make inferences about which characters might belong to the same family or community.
While this graph allows one to make basic inferences about the story and the interactions between characters, many important aspects of the story are not represented by the graph. For example, since this graph is not weighted, it treats every interaction between characters to have occurred only in one scene. However, the reality is that several characters interacted multiple times throughout the story. This graph is limited in that it does not express the strength of relationship between characters. Furthermore, one should be careful to not judge the importance of characters based off of this graph. There are a few characters that appear in the fringes of this graph, but in reality are actually driving forces to this story.
Another thing lacking from this graph is a distinction between the nature of the characters. Given the backdrop of a war and storyline of Kashmir being a war torn state, most people can be categorized based on which side of the war they believe. This story is also about reconciling those differences and about people who made surprising choices of which side they identified with, despite their family’s beliefs. This graph could better show the conflict of the story by coloring the nodes of each character based on the side with which that character identified with. This would further highlight to the reader the different sides present in one family or community, and would drive home the author’s point more directly.
Wonderful post! Visually, your network graph is very engaging because it has so many mini networks within the overall network graph. It would be interesting to see how the graph would behave if you could drag all the character nodes that identify with one side in one direction, and drag all the character nodes that identify with the other side in the opposite direction. I also agree that color coding the nodes would help indicate either side of the war. I had the same desire for my own graph, but I wasn’t able to figure out how to do so on Google Fusions Tables.
Great analysis! Your network graph incorporated many different characters and I had a better idea of those involved in the narrative. However, I agree with the limitations you describe. It’s difficult for me to understand the strength of each character and how much they contributed to the story as well as which side of the war they represented. That would be pretty important to include for me to understand of the interaction was between country lines or within their own group. Your analysis was spot on to what I was thinking.
I love how your network involves so many different nodes, it really grabbed my attention as I was scrolling through the posts. Your analysis was also really insightful, and your note that this graph would better indicate the conflict in the story if each character was assigned one of two colors was really perceptive. I think a lot of people struggled to show which characters were important to the plotline, but yours does a great job at showing which people are connected to one another in your story.
Fantastic analysis. You did a great job connecting the elements in the chart to features in your story. I enjoyed reading your take on what the chart was lacking. It is important when designing a map such as this that one acknowledges the major drawbacks. Unfortunately, it seems almost impossible to include every major attribute of any story in such a simplistic design.