I chose to work with Callan Wink’s short story titled, “One More Last Stand.” In the story, Perry is an actor in the Custer’s Last Stand re-enactment and travels to Little Bighorn Valley for the three day show. He involves himself in an affair with another actress, Kat, each time they meet.
I built my edge list with the criteria of who each character knows (broadly). For example, it is never explicitly stated that Kat knows the new bartender, yet she received Perry’s request which supposes that Kat knows the bartender and has talked to him. I also excluded people who were just mentioned and did not add to the story. I surprisingly had a lot of difficulty in making my nodes list, too, which I definitely was not expecting. Considering that the short story is told mainly from Perry’s point of view, I expected that Perry would link with the most number of people.
After looking at my network graph, my initial hypothesis is correct. However, the new Bartender is actually linked to many people as well. I likely could’ve graphed this by hand because the connections between characters was fairly straightforward and not as complex. While this illuminates that Perry and the Bartender are the most popular/ people with the most connections, this network graph doesn’t demonstrate how people know each other (including marital link, location, time frame). Finding a way to show all of these would likely produce the best network graph for the short story.