| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Affective Networks in Ensemble Character Dramas

This version was saved 11 years, 9 months ago View current version     Page history
Saved by Hannah Goodwin
on June 7, 2012 at 9:35:46 am
 

 

Affective Networks in Ensemble Character Dramas

By Alston D'Silva and Hannah Goodwin

 

Abstract

Our project aims to use social networking tools to analyze affective relationships and racial and sexual difference in multi-season television dramas, including Lost, Friday Night Lights, and Star Trek: Next Generation. We believe that social network graphs can illuminate the extent to which minority characters are integrated into, or segregated from, their larger fictional communities. By flattening other dimensions of the shows, like time, dialogic content, and plot turns, these networks make character interaction across difference starkly visible.

 

The Idea Behind Our Project

We began with the premise that certain kinds of textual deformance may expose affective relationships between characters that might not otherwise come to the fore. The supercut, or a video that compiles clips of recurring tropes across multiple episodes of a show (or even multiple television shows or movies), is one example of such a deformance. YouTube user tarnationsauce2 assembled a supercut that accrues the many instances that Lt. Worf's contributions are sidelined, belittled or shut down in his interactions both professional and personal over his multi-season television show Star Trek: The Next Generation. For the viewers that might follow the show, the supercut emphasizes how frequently Worf's concerns generally turn out to be justified. Perhaps unsurprisingly, commentators underscore the racial undertones of the tendency, complicating the liberal politic of race in the Star Trek ethos.   

 

 

Through a type of deformance, this supercut seems to makes legible, tracable and definite in the aggregate affective charges of social networks what might only be a suspicion in the disaggregate, linear and discrete approach to the same material. Large ensemble cast in multi-season shows have become an increasingly common form in television. The escalation of scale in terms length, characters, plot and relations as well as the quantity of knowledge created seem to invite approaches of criticism that can exploit and come to terms with network, both within and outside the text.

 

Methodology

Our project has explored these possibilities to examine difference (race, sexuality) in texts such as Friday Night Lights and Lost by:

  • a process of deformance wherein we took an episode and erase every instance of a character. In doing so, we were interested in how the text remains legible by its exclusion or whether new insights become legible.
  • networking the affective relations of characters while indicating aspects of identity made legible by the text (race, gender, national origin, access). We have drawn on information from fan wikis to construct a network that spans multiple seasons, and also drawn on the text itself to do mappings of individual episodes for comparison. Such affective mappings have revealed the horizon of social relations imaginable for characters within the parameters of their universe, and the extent of interaction across difference.
  • deforming the graphed networks much in the way that we will deform the text itself, exploring how the shapes and connections in the graph change when a certain character is removed. We have considered certain basic aspects of graph theory, like the degree of connectedness of certain nodes, and thus their centrality in the power dynamic of the social structure.

While we have not had the time to do so yet, in the future we might also pursue networks outside the text, such as relationships of show creators across franchises. 

 

Tools Used

 

Individual Project Pages

Friday Night Lights

I (Hannah) have chosen to do a social network analysis of racial interaction on the show Friday Night Lights, which aired from 2006 to 2011 on NBC. Click the above link for access to my project page, which includes an explanation of the show, several social network graphs, and some preliminary analysis of my findings.

 

Examples of Character Mapping

From a fan site, an example of mapping in another large character ensemble. Click to Enlarge. 

X-Men Universe Relationship Map 

 

Moral Alignment Meme: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CharacterAlignment

 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.