We all know about social networks - when you use your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or any other social apps on your electronic devices trying to connect with other people, you are “social networking”. But today here, we are going to discuss some social networks in the movie, or in the TV shows.

What is Social Networks in a movie?

Social Networks in movies or TV shows are basically the relationships between characters. It is a way to study - to help the audience get to know the relationships between the characters and get through the big idea of the story, so the audience would have clue about what the story is. For example, the TV show “The Vampire Diary” (TVD), has SO MANY characters involved, some people just show up ramdomly in one or two episode, and have very little BUT important relationships with the main charaters and help the story goes on. When such big group of characters get involved, the audience are easily forget them when episodes keep coming out, but by making a social network, as it was addressed in article, “Social network analysis in a movie using character-net”, by Seung-Bo Park, Kyeong-Jin Oh and Geun-Sik Jo in 2012, “Generally, movie stories are progressed by characters. Characters comprise the main body of events, which are composed of actions or dialogs between them. And, the flow of events creates a story. As the relationships between characters are mainly represented by dialogs, they can be determined by dialogs between characters”.

What are the ways to work the Social Networks in the movie?

There are certain ways to help the audience build the map of the relationships between characters, also, scholars can use these ways to make it easier when studying the movie.

1. Building a Character-net based on social relationships among characters.
2. Classifying role classes as major, minor or extra according to the centrality of a character in a Character-net.
3. Detecting sequences via the community clustering in a Character-net.

Works related to movie analysis

There are few aspects are related to movie analysis when studying the social networks between characters, here is a chart to help you find those aspects: https://static-content.springer.com/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs11042-011-0725-1/MediaObjects/11042_2011_725_Fig1_HTML.gif Story structure and hierarchical video, as well as speaker and listener identification are also the aspects to focus when study the Social Networks of the movie.

References:

Social network analysis in a movie using character-net. (n.d.). Retrieved September 26, 2016, from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11042-011-0725-1