For this week, I decided to create a network graph for First Semester by Rachel B. Glaser and John Maradik.
The story follows Sarah’s first semester in college. She is a premed student who has to go through the hardships of fitting in and adjusting to this new chapter in her life. The graph indicates a connection everytime Sarah has an interaction with someone. Throughout the story, she interacts with multiple groups of people such as her premed friends, her family, her friend Georgie, and more.
The story takes some interesting turns, and if I were to redo this chart, I would probably add weights to the links by making them heavier or making the nodes bigger by number of interactions. While Sarah’s node is the biggest, it is due to the number of interactions she has had as a whole, not by individual.
She has had significantly more interactions with Georgie, Colin, and David, but this can’t be seen through the graph. In addition to this, some of the narrative was unclear. An example of this was Georgie’s friend at the party. Was this the person that Georgie was holding hands with, or was it someone new? These things would be helpful when constructing a graph.
I think your graph does a great job exemplifying degree centrality. Just from your graph without reading the short story, I can tell Sarah is the main character due to her centrality in the network and large degree of connections.
Great network graph! I think you did a very good job of portraying Sarah’s importance in the story and all of her encounters through the graph. When I was doing my graph, I also found it difficult to illustrate what type of interaction occurred and how strong each connection actually was. Perhaps there could be a rating system to show the closeness of the characters incorporated into the graph.
Great job with the blog post this week! I also examined this story and completely agree that a rating or weighting system would have probably significantly helped out in differentiating which connections were more important. I also liked your idea of associating node size with interaction number since I feel like that would be a really easy way of discerning which characters had the most number of interactions.
I enjoyed reading your blog. The visualization helps to illuminate the story and makes the connections or interactions easily understood. Your idea of adding weight to links or making the nodes bigger is a good approach to making the visualization even more effective.