The dataset is the 4th and 5th books of the A Song of Ice and Fire book series, where the nodes are the characters, and the edges are the characters being mentioned within fifteen words of each other. This includes anytime two characters were in the same location, were having a conversation, where one character talks to another character, where one character listens to another character talk about a third character, as well as one character talking about two other characters. The links are also mutual to make it simpler, meaning that if a character mentions another character, but the mentioned doesn’t also mention them, there still is a connection between them. The thickness of the lines correlate to The reason why it is both the 4th and 5th books is because they happen concurrently in the chronology of the story and were originally planned to be one book. This project was created by going through the all of the capitalized words in the books, the fan created wiki which provided aliases for characters as well, but was less reliable for minor characters, as well as fan compiled first appearences of every character. They also had to go through names that are used for multiple characters by hand to find out which character they were refering to, such as the name “Jon” being used for Jon Snow, Jon Arryn, Jon Connington, or even other “Jons” as well. There are also many titled characters, such as Maesters, Lords, Ladys and Sers. They gave the example that for each instance of the word “King,” describing King Joffery in particular got its own special manual descriptor. They then loaded their data into the softward Gephi, which gave the network we see now. This project allows the reader to see which characters are most important by how many connections they have, as well as the total number of pages that they occupy by themselves.
