For this blog post, I decided to read the short story “The Tenant” by Victor Lodato. This story is about an alcoholic named Marie who becomes a tenant of the McGregor family. She lives in a small house on their land where she mainly drinks and reads books. You learn that her parents died causing her to derail her fairly normal life as an artist, become an alcoholic (or maybe a more pronounced one), and live a fairly nomadic life with very few possessions. She befriends one of the McGregor kids, Harland, and ends up helping him become a stronger reader in return for manual labor and ultimately companionship. As time goes on, she sinks deeper and deeper into alcoholism and eventually is hospitalized. The story ends with Harland going through her stuff after her death and reflecting on how she helped him develop into the person he is today.
As I read the story, I noticed that “place” was an important part of the story. Therefore, I decided to create a network map with Google Fusion tables to illustrate the connections between important people and places in the story. The nodes are places such as Marie’s house and the hospital while the edges are the people that connect the places such as Marie and Harland.
This graph illustrates how places connect people in the story. For example, Marie’s House and the McGregor’s Land/House are important places which makes sense because that’s where the two main characters live and most of the character interactions take place. While this graph illustrates the importance between character interaction and place, it doesn’t innately show why these places are important to the story line. For example, the hospital only becomes an important place at the very end of the story when Marie gets sick and lots of characters come visit her. However, the way it’s represented in the graph makes it seem like it’s just as relevant throughout the story as the McGregor’s Land/house and Marie’s house. As a result, anyone looking at the graph would be missing important contextual information about why certain places have more connections than others.
I really like how you chose to work with settings as opposed to characters. I feel like a lot of these network graphs do a great job of showing the relationships between different characters, yet it’s refreshing to see how network graphs/analysis can be applied to other aspects of a story.
I agree with the comment above, that it is neat to see a network graph on something other than character relationships. I think another limitation of these network graphs to take into consideration (especially if you had done an edge list based on characters) is time. Marie’s relational and place connections would have greatly differed in the time before her parents died in comparison to after. Such a visualization would definitely be interesting to see!
I like the idea of creating a map regarding locations in the story, though it might be more insightful as a complementary part of a character map. The summary of the story you gave was intriguing, and I can envision many complicated and unique relationships that can be displayed on a network map.
I LOVE your unique spin on this graph and how you used places instead of characters. I think its so fitting you did that because the title of the short story is alluding to a place and it seems that location and place was a huge element of the short story. The fact that you used location in your edge map really highlights the importance of location and shows huge insight. One thing that bothers me here though, is the fact that I can’t know which characters connect the locations to what. I don’t know if this is possible using Google, but it may be interesting to find a way to make all the edges different colors and corresponding to different characters.