For this week’s blog post, I decided to visualize the characters in “Breach Candy” by Samantha Subramanian.
I decided to have characters connected together if it is explicitly stated that they know of each other, or if they appear in a scene together.
This network diagram reveals information about the character’s relationships because we can see that in this story, the Narrator and Kunal Kapoor seem to have the most connections. By seeing what people they are connected to, we can get a sense for how big of an impact that character has on the story.
Of course, there is much missing from this network diagram. There is no way to tell exactly what the relationships between these characters are. For example, the Narrator and Kunal Kapoor are friends, but Gerry Shirley and Dipesh Mehta are enemies. There is also no way to understand the trajectory of the narrative or story through this network diagram. It only shows the characters in the story and if they relate to one another, not how they are related or what specific impact they or their relationships have.
Risha Sanikommu
I like the way you chose to define edges between characters, it is good for showing which characters are the most central to the story. I agree with your critique on the limitations of the network- I had a similar critique of my own network because I felt the edges were not sufficient to show the complexity of the relationships between characters.
I think you did a good job with your network graph and did a good job explaining the pitfalls of using this technique. Your network is extensive which shows that you did a good job reading for content and identifying relationships. I like how you didn’t hold yourself back to just analyzing direct relationships between characters. Back to the downfalls of the network, I wonder if there is a way to color code the connection lines between characters to represent their relationship (e.g., red = enemy, green = friend).
I definitely agree with you in what these network graphs fail to show, and also the fact that they are at least able to show a level of impact and relevance a character has in a story. I liked how you considered to points to connect your characters, regarding whether they appear together and if they explicitly know each other. Great job overall! Seems like a more complicated network graph, which must’ve taken some more time.