While I admit I’ve never read or watched any of Game of Thrones (although I hope to get around to it soon), I was drawn in by the intricate, colorful webs displayed on the Network of Thrones site. Network visualization has been intriguing to me ever since I analyzed Linked Jazz on a previous blog post, and this application of network analysis to a set of characters in a book and TV series felt applicable to my own life and interests.
Network of Thrones presents a web of character interactions individually for each book and each season in the series. They also created two aggregated networks, where all of the seasons are combined into a large network, and all of the books are combined into a separate network.
In each network, the nodes represent a character, and they determined the characters to include by first searching for all of the characters in the books, then searching on the fan-site A Wiki of Ice and Fire, which catalogs all characters in both the books and TV series. Edges represent interactions between characters, and interactions are defined as the two characters’ names appearing within 15 words of each other, in either the texts or script. This is perhaps not the most accurate way to identify relationships between characters, but the creators acknowledge this and explain that given the volume of the data, this method of finding connections is mostly accurate and correct interactions are far more common than mistaken connections. However, I do think there are more accurate methods for finding interactions between characters.
I appreciate that Network of Thrones has also represented the strength of the relationships between characters through the line weight of the edges. There are some characters which appear to be strongly connected since they have a high quantity of interactions with each other, but again this is not foolproof. I think it probably works a lot of the time, but there may be situations where two characters are married but they don’t have much dialogue due to authorial choices, so that strong bond is not fully represented in the network.
Overall, I especially like the presentation of Network of Thrones; they’ve done a good job with making it aesthetically pleasing on GEPHI and I think it would be a fun project to try and do my own (scaled down) version of another text!
1 thought on “Digging deeper into Network of Thrones”
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I have also not watched Game of Thrones yet, but based on your introduction of the network and the network itself, I have a basic sense of the complicated character relationship in the series. I also like the strength of the relationships between characters represented by the line weight of the edges as you mentioned in your blog. Overall, this is a great intro to the network!!