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Hannah's Bibliography

Page history last edited by Hannah Goodwin 11 years, 10 months ago

Annotated Bibliography Assignment

 

By Hannah Goodwin, Affective Networks in Ensemble Character Dramas

 

1. Moody, James. 2001. “Race, School Integration, and Friendship Segregation in America.” American Journal of Sociology 107 (3): 679–716. Web. 9 May 2012.

 

This article is the result of a sociological study of high school students and their social networks. It uses social network analysis to demonstrate the degree of racial interactivity in schools, which it displays in relationship to the level of heterogeneity in those schools. Moody discusses the concept of “homophily,” which he explains as a “well-known preference for similarity in social relations” (683), and uses graphs of social networks based on reported friendships to illustrate this trend. He argues that homophily the relationship between homophily and heterogeneity is non-linear; homophily is highest in schools with a middling amount of heterogeneity, and lowest both in highly heterogenous schools and in schools with the smallest minority populations. Moody looks for examples of integration and segregation in the networks he analyzes, defining integration as when friendships are formed independent of racial background, and segregation as when friendships do not form across racial divides.  He performs a mathematical analysis on the graphs, determining the degree of heterogeneity and segregation by using mathematical equations.

 

However, even without applying Moody’s more mathematical approach, a digital humanities scholar will find much of use in this article. Moody demonstrates through this article the usefulness to racial analysis of examining patterns that emerge through social network graphing.The graphs make visible trends in the formation of interracial friendships; for example, he notes that such friendships are more likely to occur in school where extracurricular activities are well-integrated. While he studies real-life situations, the methodology he uses to look at levels of interracial interaction can be applied to fictional works as well. Rather than looking at the expression of homophily in individual agents, a social network analysis approach to fictional works would examine homophilic biases, assumptions, observations, or statements of the works’ creators.

 

 


2. Easley, David, and John Kleinberg. Networks and Strategic Behavior: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print.

 

This book is co-authored by two Cornell professors, one of Computer Science and the other of Economics. It provides an excellent overview of how to analyze social networks using various frameworks, mostly mathematical. Its usefulness for a humanities scholar lies in the vocabulary it lays out, as well as some of the more basic concepts it discusses. Easley and Kleinberg usefully outline ways of looking at network structure in terms of ideas like balance, power, homophily, social capital, segregation, and equilibrium. In doing so they provide useful tools for looking at patterns of behavior, for modeling that behavior graphically, and for analyzing what network connections mean sociologically. The motivation of the book is quite interdisciplinary: the authors demonstrate the uses of social network theory for economics, epidemiology, sociology, engineering, psychology, and computer science, among other disciplines. Its more basic mathematical methodologies, accessible even to most humanities scholars, range from calculating the shortest distance between two nodes, to analyzing power within networks, to looking at network stability. While this is not the kind of book that lends itself to cover-to-cover reading, it is an immensely useful resource to turn to for help modeling and interpreting social networks.

 

 


3. “Friday Night Lights.” Fan Forum. 2012. Web. 9 May 2012. (http://www.fanforum.com/f243/index4.html)

 

This website houses an extensive fan forum for the fans of Friday Night Lights. Its usefulness for social network graphing lies largely in the structure of the threads, many of which are devoted to specific relationships between characters. For example, there are several threads that focus on one of the primary relationships of the film, that between the football coach and his wife. These threads are given titles such as “Mr. and Mrs. Coach [E&T] #13 ~No matter where they are, They are still The Heart of Texas~,” or “Mr. and Mrs. Coach [E&T] #14: Because Coach would love to start Tami,” and include in their content still photographs of the couple taken from multiple episodes across the show’s five seasons, quotes from their shared scenes, and even quotes from devoted fans describing their attachment to the fictional relationship. The ensuing discussion gives fans room to discuss the characters and the ins and outs of their relationship, including predictions and hopes for its future. Such threads exist not only for romantic relationships, but also for particularly affecting friendships or close familial bonds. The information contained in the thread titles alone are ripe for social network analysis, and the kind of commentary such threads engender gives an excellent sense of the affective nature of the relationships.

 

 

 


4. Bastian M., Heymann S., Jacomy M. (2009). Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating networks. International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. Web. 9 May 2012.

 

Gephi is a network graphing tool, downloadable for free from https://gephi.org/. Gephi, unlike most open source network analysis software, is accessible to the computer novice; no coding is involved and no special computer science skills are necessary. That said, its interface is not always intuitive, and can be difficult to navigate for an unfamiliar user. The method of entering data and turning that data into a graph is simple. It requires merely adding “nodes” and then dictating between which nodes edges should appear. Here is an example of the data entered textually:

 

 

However, once the graph appears, figuring out how to manipulate it productively has a steeper learning curve. And undoing the havoc one has inadvertently wrought on a formerly legible graph is somewhat frustratingly difficult.

 

 

With practice, though, one could use this tool quite productively. The graphs produced by experienced users are quite intricate and use color-coding and node size in ways that actually signify—unlike in my experimental graph in which colors appeared without my knowing what they meant. This tool is free and fairly user-friendly, and it looks to be able to perform advanced functions for a practiced user. 

 


 

 


5. Vihljalmsson, Heimir Berg. “In Black and White: A Study of the Portrayal of Racism in the Book, Film, and Television Versions of H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights.” BA Thesis University of Haskoli Islands, 2009. Web. 9 May 2012.

 

This article is one of very few pieces of academic work about Friday Night Lights, and is a comparative analysis of representations of racism in the original book and its film and television series adaptations. Vihljalmsson’s argument, in brief, is that the book, a non-fictional, sociological account of a small Texas town’s racism that centers on a high school football team, is able to provide a more in-depth and frank assessment of the extent of racism than are either of the audiovisual adaptations. He attributes the muting of the issue of racism in the television show to the fact that it aired on network television, and thus was restricted in what it could portray. He writes that in spite of these limitations, the television show does display signs of the town’s racial conflict, albeit discretely: “The producers of the television series stumble upon the . . . difficulties of how to challenge the blatant vocabulary used in the book, and . . . they use a much more restrained and subconscious way to deal with the subject of racial discrimination” (21). This article draws heavily on a New York Times review of the pilot episode, written by Edward Wyatt. It too compares the show to the book, and is quite critical of the representation of racial dynamics in the show.

This paper has many limitations. The author is clearly a devotee of the book, and does not consider the television show’s representations on their own terms. His analysis of race on the show is abbreviated, and does not go beyond comparison to the book. Furthermore, he seems to conflate the term “racism” with issues of race more generally, not always distinguishing between racist acts/speech and the economic and sociological effects of long-term, entrenched racism. However, as part of a miniscule set of work on Friday Night Lights, it is at least a point of departure for further investigation.

  

 

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