For my blog post for Week 8, I decided to read the short story “Lessons” by Justin Torres. This story centers on the life of a hardworking multi-cultural family. The characters include the father, paps, and the mother, Ma, and their three sons, Joel, Manny, and the Narrator whose name is never explicitly stated. The story provides background on their life and how the boys ran around their home and provided two detailed scenes to show how the family lives. The first scene is the three little boys dancing with their father as he prepared dinner, and the other shows a family outing to a swimming hole and how Ma and the Narrator do not know how to swim. There are not many characters in the short story and the lack of an abundance of scenes provides limited interaction, but direct interaction between characters can be tracked to an extent.
The network data visualization that I created for this short story displays the direct interactions between members of the family. I chose to use “direct interactions” rather than characters speaking to each other because there is a lot of very important non-verbal communication between characters in the two main scenes.
This network can be used to identify the interactions between characters. Using this network, a viewer can make many assumptions as to what these interactions represent. This is because this network is very limited in the sense that it portrays a list of binary interactions by answering the question of whether two characters interacted. Nothing of deeper meaning can be extrapolated from this data without making large speculations. Some assumptions that could be made from this data is that Paps and Ma interact with the Narrator more because he is younger, because he needs to be disciplined more, because he needs to be taught, or simply because the story is told from his point-of-view.
Another pitfall of this data visualization is the fact that it is representing interactions between individuals when the short story wasn’t about characters interacting. The main point of this story was to provide a glimpse of the life of this family and how their history has influenced how they live on a day-to-day basis. While networks can be useful tools, they primarily just provide a more visually pleasing way to answer a binary question. I do not believe that the utilization of network graphs is the best way to represent data found in a short stories.
Your decision to create your network graph based on direct interactions reinforces the importance of our criteria for a “relationship” when we create network graphs (and visualizations in general). As you mention, if you had created the graph based only on verbal interactions, you might have left out some very significant nonverbal aspects of the story. Worse, someone viewing the graph might not be aware that you had left out significant interactions and would arrive at an incomplete understanding of the story. I encountered a similar issue with the story I chose, and decided that a relationship constituted a character mentioning another character, even if they never directly interacted. Though I hesitated because this organizing principle complicated the graph, I felt that it more accurately depicted the story’s focus on gossip.