
Network visualization: mapping Shakespeare’s tragedies - hunglee2
http://www.martingrandjean.ch/network-visualization-shakespeare/
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danso
Cool analysis...I think the works of Shakespeare are vastly underused for fun
little tests of text mining and visualization, given how accessible (well, in
the downloadable/publishing sense, if not the language :) ), ubiquitously
taught, and relatively standardized they are, as far as works of literature
go.

But in terms of the article's visualizations, this seems to me a good example
of how network visualizations (note that visualization is different from
analysis, which are often conflated) are not especially effective, other than
to make people want to think "Oooh that's complicated" whether they derived
insight or not.

In contrast, I find things like this matrix diagram of Les Miserables, as
found in the D3 gallery [1], to be much more straightforward, even before you
use the dropdown box to interact with it. It's not as attractive or high of
"wow" factor, but its information clarity more than makes up for that IMO.

OTOH, one thing that the spaghetti network maps _do_ show is that there's much
room for more sophisticated analysis. The OP looks at whether characters
appeared in a single scene together. I was about to criticize the uselessness
of the Hamlet graph:

[http://www.martingrandjean.ch/wp-
content/uploads/2015/12/Sha...](http://www.martingrandjean.ch/wp-
content/uploads/2015/12/Shakespeare-Network-Hamlet.png)

But then I realized...that's what it _should_ look like if you are simply
doing scene presence analysis. From my memory, Hamlet _interacts_ with a great
many more characters than do Gertrude or Claudius, such as the Ghost and the
gravediggers. However, technically, the Ghost and the gravediggers appear in
all the same scenes that Gertrude and Claudius do. I think the network graph
would look much different if it were based on adjacent dialogue (or some other
way to distinguish between co-appearance and actual interaction). It's a
little more parsing but it would be more accurate in quantifying the strength
of the network ties.

[1]
[http://bost.ocks.org/mike/miserables/](http://bost.ocks.org/mike/miserables/)

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peter303
Someone should graph the Avengers which seems to ave an abundance of main
characters. Shakespera results seem to show on or two protangonists and
antagonists each works better.

