Measuring centrality in film narratives using dynamic character interaction networks

TLDR: A directed dynamic measure of relative character importance based on character interactions is suggested and illustrated through an examination of gender in the 2015 film Star Wars: The Force Awakens, finding that the measure helps illuminate important narrative dynamics which cannot be captured by static measures.

About: This article is published in Social Networks.The article was published on 2020-10-01 and is currently open access. It has received 3 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Centrality & Social network analysis.

Figures

Figure A.7a. Speaking and spoken to measures against outdegree and indegree for 𝜆 = 0.01, 0.05, and 0.1. Black points indicate characters from The Force Awakens, blue points indicate characters from 18 MCU films.

Figure A.2. 𝑟𝑐 as a function of 𝜆.

Figure A.3.: Distributed speech dynamic graphs SSS (a), GOT (b), and GTC (c).

Table 1. Spoken-to scores for sequences (1) and (2).

Figure A.1. The dynamic graph of DAS (a) and DTT (b) for 4 acts of speech.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in "Measuring centrality in film narratives using dynamic character interaction networks" ?

The tools of social network analysis offer a promising framework for studying fictional texts and the relational activity of the characters therein. The goal of this paper is to offer both a conceptual refinement of the project of measuring the centrality of characters within narratives using network tools, as well as the proposal of a novel measure with which to do so. Conceptually, the authors argue that as questions of time, order and sequence are central in narratives, measures of characters ’ narrative importance should be based on dynamic network representations which respect the time-ordering of narrative events. The authors find that the measure helps illuminate important narrative dynamics which can not be captured by static measures, and presents a platform on which future character network research can productively build. The authors suggest a directed dynamic measure of relative character importance based on character interactions and illustrate it through an examination of gender in the 2015 film Star Wars: The Force Awakens. 

Q2. What does the dialogue-based character interaction network representation assume?

The dialogue-based character interaction network representation the authors describe here assumes sender exclusivity but not necessarily receiverexclusivity. 

Q3. What is the purpose of the work on narrative networks?

Work on narrative networks has broadly aimed at mapping the temporal relations between narrative events to try to build a picture of how people construct identities and shared meanings through the assembly of historical events into narratives. 

Q4. What are some of the insights of this work?

Some of the insights of this work, such as the importance of time for understanding narrative phenomena, are directly relevant to the development of character networks scholarship and will be drawn on in the next section. 

Q5. What is the purpose of this paper?

This paper aims to develop a character interaction-based approach to investigating the positions of characters within film narratives. 

Q6. How have these tools been applied to literary texts?

Network tools have also been applied to literary texts at the node level through the application of centrality measures to the characters in a text. 

Q7. What is the purpose of a measure of relative importance of a character in a narrative?

such a measure ought to be linked to a character’s narrative activity, in order to satisfy the idea of narratives as a distributed field of attention between characters. 

Q8. How does the score of the speaking measure affect the narrative?

In lay terms, using this 𝜆 value of 0.01 for the speaking measuremeans that each time a character speaks, their score becomes what it was prior to speaking plus one percent of the average score of the characters to whom they speak. 

Q9. What is the reason why static character network representations are unlikely to offer satisfactory models of fictional texts?

Static character network representations are therefore unlikely to offer satisfactory models of fictional texts as they compress and flatten narratives through aggregation such that narrative time is lost in the representation3 (Moody et al. 2005). 

Q10. What should be the principle of a measure of relative importance of a narrative text?

such a measure ought to be dynamic and based on a temporally disaggregated network representation of the narrative text. 

Q11. What is the significance of the computational approach for character networks research?

the authors suggest that one of the implications of this paper for character networks research is that the computational approach can be an effective tool for analysing how stories are told, with some minor adjustments.