Creating a Network

Complete by: Tuesday 7 Feb. at 12:30pm

In this assignment you will practice creating and collecting some network data as part of a team. You’ll organize the data and manipulate it using the tools we learned about in class.

Here are the steps you can follow:

1. As a team, look over Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life so that you can make a network of the story’s characters. (n.b. This story was the basis for the movie Arrival!)
2. Together with your team, come up with a plan for how to collect network data from the story. You’ll receive team assignments in class on Thursday. There are many ways to connect the characters in this story. Some of the characters are human and some aren’t. You could create a network of relationships (who is in the same family/workplace/friend group?), or you could create a network of cooccurrence (which characters appear together in the same scene, the same paragraph, the same conservation?). The important thing is that you choose a principle of connection and stick through it as you collect data.
3. Choose a data format and keep an organized record of your network. You might decide to keep your data in an edge table or an adjacency table, for instance. Whatever you choose should be agreed upon by the rest of the team, so that different people can collect data into the same file.
4. Record information about nodes as well as edges. How you organize this data is up to you, but consider collecting information on both node and edge attributes.
5. Once you’ve collected this data, convert it to a .gml file using NetworkX.
6. Finally, use Network Navigator to visualize your network. You should export your visualization as a .png file. Remember to add some detail to the visualization, i.e. don’t just go with the default. Change the color or styling, update the positions of the nodes, add labels, etc.

When you are finished, your team should submit the original data file you created, along with your converted .gml file and your visualization .png file. Also submit a short written paragraph that describes what your principle of connection was and how you collected your data. You can upload all of this to Sakai.