This week, in my exploration of Digital Humanities Research. I was given the opportunity to map character interactions in Once Upon a Time. My first, thoughts on this was that it was time consuming, and I did not understand the point. My mindset on this was soon changed as I reviewed my notes. I discovered more about the importance of this after I read the reading. Reviewing my character interaction notes, I could see how well the underlying themes and relationships could be outlined just by mapping out who interacts with who. Throughout my notes, which can be viewed in the data page under the once-data on github, it can be seen that Snow White, Prince Charming, Emma and Henry play a very large part in the central story of the show. There are almost no interactions that take place without at least one of them. Although, through watching the show I could see that those characters were important, reviewing my notes really allowed me to see the extent of the importance they played. This showed me how using character nets or social networks can deepen the understanding of something. This idea was further supported after reading Social Network Analysis in a Movie Using Character-Net by authors Park, Oh, and Jo. This article helped to further explain the role of social network analysis by explaining that stories are almost entirely supported by the characters in it. Because of this, character nets give a wider and more simplified image of the story as a whole. Although, the article seemed to  discuss more about  classifying characters using more in-depth character nets, it can be clearly seen that even just documenting interactions offers clarification and deepened understanding of the story.

This method of visualization is similar to text-analysis, which I discussed in my last blog post, but it is done in a way that assesses more than just words used, which gives a different understanding of the text. I am beginning  to broaden my definition of digital humanities. I can now see that digital humanities encompasses more than just scanning a book through a program, but it involves a variety of art and literature analysis. I am curious to see if there will be any imagery analysis ahead on my journey.

Sources

Park, S., Oh, K. & Jo, G. Multimed Tools Appl (2012) 59: 601. doi:10.1007/s11042-011-0725-1