This week I read the short story The Martians Claim Canada written by Margaret Atwood. The story begins with three Martians eagerly awaiting their arrival in New York to watch a musical. However, instead of landing in New York they find themselves in Canada looking for directions. Having the ability to communicate with mushrooms, they decide to ask the mushroom about where exactly they have landed. The mushroom begins to explain to them the history of the land and other social constructs of colonialism, countries, and civilization. Overall, the mushroom depicts the tragedy of claiming land and how certain peoples, ideologies, and traditions can be buried by a new society with power. The story concludes with the three Martians deciding to claim Canada as their own so they can write and watch their own musical production, Canada the Musical. The story of The Martians Claim Canada is a quirky tale highlighting the confusing and unfortunate methods of society and colonization. With subtle touches of humor throughout, the heavy nature of the topic is broken down without the loss of the main focus of the story.
Using Google Fusion Tables, I was able to build a simple network graph to show the connections between characters. Since most of the story is in the dialogue between the three Martians and the mushroom, the visualization reflects this below:
Having never really worked with Google Fusion Tables before it was really interesting and cool to see how this application could be used to track connections between people. If a story had a long list of characters with a lot of moving parts, one could quickly lose track of connections between characters. Using Fusion Tables, one would easily be able to see the relations between all of them. In this visualization in particular, it looks as if all the dots are similar size as all of the characters have fairly equal speaking parts. However, when looking closely at the story, the mushroom has much longer and more significant dialogue than the other three Martians. Thus, the length of the conversation isn’t really taken into account.