I decided to analyze the Network of Thrones website for my blog post. I was interested in this website because I just recently finished watching Game of Thrones, so I was intrigued by the premise of the website. The website was created by analyzing fan-authored scripts and connecting characters by finding scenes where they either mention each other or appear together. I think this is an interesting way to find the scenes where characters are mentioned together. The website has many different ways of using network analysis to show the many different and overarching relationships in Game of Thrones. One way that Network of Thrones does this is by using a relationship web to connect all of the different characters in the show. The nodes are the characters in the show and the edges are an interaction or connection between the two character nodes. One thing that helps make the relationship web easier to understand is that the web is colored based on location and plotline: for example, Jon Snow and other characters who were involved with The Wall are colored in orange, characters involved with Danaerys across the Narrow Sea are in green, etc. The most important characters have larger nodes as well so that you can determine who the most important characters are and how they connect with the many smaller characters in the show. The website doesn’t allow for too much interaction with the network displays as they are only still images. I think it does hurt the effectiveness as it can get a bit disorienting and hard to see what nodes are connected together, but I still found the website to be pretty interesting and it definitely makes recollection of certain characters and their relationships easier for people who may not remember the show very well.
I definitely agree that this website is very interesting. One of my favorite parts of this website is that it is pretty intuitive. There is not much that is left to the user to guess what everything means. That being said, I do see that there is a lack of interaction between the user and the website itself. I think implementing a way to have a brief description of each character and the different groups would certainly make this more usable, especially for users who have not seen Game of Thrones or need a little refresher on all the names.