After clicking on a variety of posts that merely only contained two characters in the short stories, I finally came across the short story, “First Semester” by Rachel B. Glaser and John Maradik, containing many characters. It’s interesting to see that this story was written by two people… I wonder how they interacted in their process to complete this creative task. I chose to make a list of all the characters that actually had direct and explicit interactions with one another. My “social network” is shown, having used Google Fusion Tables from my edge list, which contained multiple other columns of information, as well. I decided the direct interactions network graph looked most interesting, in comparison to sex, for example, because the other networks bunched together and were hard to read.
My network graph illuminates each main characters’ direct interactions, but it does not show how well one knows another person (or not). Sarah, our protagonist, is nicely shown in the center of the graph due to the story following her many interactions with family and friends. I did not include relationships expressed in the story that may have formed prior to the tale taking place, but were not explicitly shown through dialogue or personal interaction. I chose to do this because I wanted to maintain a sense of uniformity in the data, and I wanted the network graph to look a lot more like a “social network”… with its main characters at its center, and minor characters surrounding. These minor characters perhaps also act as foil characters to the main characters in the story. For example, the Dean and his wife remain in a binary, yet mutual, relationship, though they also may have had many direct interactions with each of the students in the larger section of the graph, due to his occupation. This was not explicitly stated in the story. My network graph does reflect how removed the main character is from David’s “Other Worlds Girl” – quite symbolic, if you are able to read the full story.
The network graph’s main limitation is that this graph does not show potential relationships with people prior to or after the story took place; these relationships could drastically alter the look of the social networks formed in this story. Also, it does not show how strong or weak each relationship is, such as “Random ‘What are you…’ Dude” (from a party) remaining in the same relationship strength as “Colin”, who Sarah forms an actual loving relationship with. Alternately, the color addition did not make much sense to true meaning of the network graph itself, either.
Overall, using Google Fusion Tables was not a difficult task, and I found that my data nicely formatted into the network graph format. This was mainly due to my finding of a story that had many characters in it… otherwise the network graph would have been binary and somewhat boring, aesthetically speaking.
Great job. I like that you searched for a story that would make an interesting-looking network graph; I agree that many of the stories were too binary, but yours has an excellent sense of depth. I wonder if the network graph would look different if the story had only had one author.
I think you did a great job expressing how you personally wanted your graph to look, expressing “uniformity” and the appearance of a social network as important to you. As we’ve discussed in class, I think we often think of charts & graphs as some objective measure, but your post is awesome in expressing how the goals of the person creating the graph are a determining factor in its creation. Binary graphs (like my own) are boring in an aesthetic sense and I appreciate your commitment to finding a story with an extensive character list!