A Song of Ice and Fire Network Maps
I’m a huge nerd and I love the Song of Ice and Fire series. The story is great but the connections between characters is very complicated. While capta that come from real-world data is hard enough to map out, the character relationships in the series would be almost impossible. According to Demystifying Networks there are algorithms that help to sort out the “stuff” into nodes and the edge weights between the nodes. Creating a network can work when the “stuff” that gets put into nodes is static and doesn’t change over time. The relationship between nodes would also have to be static. The example provided in the Demystifying Networks article is a good example of static “stuff”. The author of a book isn’t going to change over time (unless it comes out that it was plagiarized from another author) That’s why I think the network of relationships between characters and houses in A Song of Ice and Fire is so problematic. The best part of the narrative is how the relationships between houses and individual characters change so drastically. As the Demystifying Networks article states “data that does not fit neatly into one category or the other” and this is true in the character network map especially when placing characters together according to their houses, which changes due to marriages often.
It would be best to create a network map that also includes a temporal component but then at that point you might as well just read the books. The relationships and network data is already so convoluted and complex that adding a temporal component might over-complicate even more but it would add important information that is currently missing from the network map. While in this case, it might not be important to figure out a way to present this data. But real-life data is just as complex as the data found with books as the main source of data (versus for instance using real-life data as a main source). Like any way we present information, how in-depth is too in-depth? When does presenting data turn into just regurgitating the data as-is?