

Show HN: PotterVerse – Visualizing the Harry Potter character network - malahay
http://efekarakus.com/potterverse
A visualization of the Harry Potter character network. Exploring whether it exhibits the same properties as a real social network.
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glesica
I'm not sure comparing this to a "real" social network is meaningful. More
appropriate might be to compare the Potterverse to another relatively small,
socially isolated, insular community like a group of Amish. I wonder how the
numbers would compare in that case.

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malahay
That's a great question! I kinda wanted to see if a fictional network would
look somewhat similar to a real social network such as Facebook. But exploring
other networks that are more secluded would be so interesting! Gathering the
data would be a challenge :)

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glesica
I don't have my copy with me right now, but Barabasi has some examples of
interesting social network data that were collected by sociologists in his
book "Linked" [1]. You might be able to get hold of some of those. IIRC there
is a prison network that might be a fair comparison.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Linked-The-New-Science-
Networks/dp/073...](http://www.amazon.com/Linked-The-New-Science-
Networks/dp/0738206679)

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joshvm
Worth pointing out if you haven't read the entire series and plan on doing so,
you should keep well away - character markers are all (needlessly?)
spoilerific.

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malahay
Ah good point, I am sorry about that.

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languagehacker
Interesting visualization. I'm wondering where this data is coming from. You
could probably construct a similar network out of all of the character pages
on [http://harrypotter.wikia.com](http://harrypotter.wikia.com).

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malahay
That's where we got our data from! This project was done with a team of 4, and
everyone entered data while trying to check facts from the Wikia. I realize
that there are some edges that are missing and some other characters, but we
hoped that this subset of characters and relations would be a good approximate
of the real harry potter universe.

If you want to take a look at the data: [https://github.com/efekarakus/potter-
network/tree/master/dat...](https://github.com/efekarakus/potter-
network/tree/master/data)

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jcutrell
It'd be really particularly interesting to understand the connections
themselves with some kind of context.

I'd also really like to see things like a subcollection of the network, and
how they would interact if they were put into a discrete network.

Cool stuff!

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tokenuser
If you are referring to ego networks (the connections between your immediate
connections), the visualization gets part way there. If you hover over a node,
it pops up a character bio. If you click a node, it shows the immediate peer
connections, but it does not go to the next step and show the connections
between the people you are connected to. Analytically, that is a great social
network analysis concept, since you can determine the balanced triads and
determine what needs to happen to either unbalance a network (and cause the
relationships to unravel) or balance a network and make it stable.

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laohu
What is the compared-to "real social network". Facebook or other online
networks? Or derived from studying meatspace communities? I imagine the
numbers are very different between the two.

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malahay
Good question :) I was referring mainly to the small world phenomenon [1],
there are also some online networks that have ~6 avg path length like
Microsoft Messenger [2]. We were just curious how a fictional network would
look like.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-
world_experiment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_experiment) [2]
[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/horvitz/leskov...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/horvitz/leskovec_horvitz_www2008.pdf)

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onuryavuz
What is your reference for the average path length within a real social
network? Six degrees of seperation?

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malahay
Yup that's right!

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onuryavuz
Cool. I have a question in my mind that you might answer or comment on. As the
social networks and internet usage grow steadily, should we expect a decrease
in average path length of a social network? Will "six degrees of seperation"
be updated to "X degrees of seperation" in the future where X<6?

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tokenuser
G'day, I am one of the others who worked on this. Study back in 2011 showed
that in Facebook at least, the average degrees of separation was 3.74 (and
closer to 2 or 3 for regional connections) ... so as we enter a more digitally
connected world, Stanley Milgram's "Smallworld" study (that gave us the
original 6 DoS metric) is contracting.

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Mtinie
Can you tell us a bit about the tools that were used to create this?

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jpan135
The visuals are generated primarily using D3.js (great data visualization
tool).

Source: I'm on the team that worked on this.

Edit: This project is open-sourced - Check it out at
[https://github.com/efekarakus/potter-
network](https://github.com/efekarakus/potter-network) :)

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m00dy
eline sağlık kanka :)

~~~
malahay
Cok tesekkurler :)

