Social network analysis of character interaction in the Stargate and Star Trek television series

Abstract

This paper undertakes a social network analysis of two science fiction television series, Stargate and Star Trek. Television series convey stories in the form of character interaction, which can be represented as “character networks”. We connect each pair of characters that exchanged spoken dialogue in any given scene demarcated in the television series transcripts. These networks are then used to characterize the overall structure and topology of each series. We find that the character networks of both series have similar structure and topology to that found in previous work on mythological and fictional networks. The character networks exhibit the small-world effects but found no significant support for power-law. Since the progression of an episode depends to a large extent on the interaction between each of its characters, the underlying network structure tells us something about the complexity of that episode’s storyline. We assessed the complexity using techniques from spectral graph theory. We found that the episode networks are structured either as (1) closed networks, (2) those containing bottlenecks that connect otherwise disconnected clusters or (3) a mixture of both.

Nurses are background actors in medical reality television: A character network analysis and call for authentic action

“…Verbal dialogue can be used to construct the network (Jones, 2020;Jones et al, 2020). Character network analysis has been used in both film (Jones, 2020;Jones et al, 2020;Park et al, 2012;Weng et al, 2009) and television series (Bost et al, 2018;Tan et al, 2017) and provides the methods to successfully investigate the use of language in television as recommended by Bednarek (2018).…”

“…Verbal dialogue can be used to construct the network (Jones, 2020; Jones et al, 2020). Character network analysis has been used in both film (Jones, 2020; Jones et al, 2020; Park et al, 2012; Weng et al, 2009) and television series (Bost et al, 2018; Tan et al, 2017) and provides the methods to successfully investigate the use of language in television as recommended by Bednarek (2018). Social network methods are underused in nursing research (Parnell & Robinson, 2018) and the application in the present study is unique compared with other nursing studies which predominantly seek to describe the network structure (see Benton et al, 2015).…”

Beauty in artistic expressions through the eyes of networks and physics

“…Notably, filmmaking has been studied in terms of actor networks-where two actors are connected if they appeared together in a movie. One of the more recent attempts in this direction is the social network analysis of character interactions in the Stargate and Star Trek television series [80]. Research revealed that the character networks of both series have small-world properties, and that the underlying network structure of an episode can tell us something about the complexity of the storyline in that particular episode.…”

Applying network theory to fables: complexity in Slovene belles-lettres for different age groups

“…It has been found that fictional social networks are small-world, highly clustered, and hierarchical, as real social networks [38,39], but typically differ from real ones in connectivity and levels of assortativity [40]. Most importantly, these empirically network-based analyses of character interactions have been proven to successfully find communities, identifying influential characters, and evaluating the complexity of a storyline [41][42][43].…”