“Pooh Goes Visiting” Short Story

Explaining my chart:

I made this from a short story about Pooh going to see Christopher Robin. There were only three characters in this short story and I made it strictly based on dialogue. Also, I made so that it was who was speaking to who and not open ended. Pooh had the most interactions and people talking to him so I made his node the biggest and then made the other two characters the same way to their perspective size. Pooh had the heaviest node. I made the nodes different colors so that one could read the character better. The identify factor is their gender and these happen to all be male. That is why there is a square around their names.

Response:

This project was not hard for me because I picked a children’s story. I tried to do it first with a book named Hawksong by Amelia-Atwater Rhodes and this became impossible. The book had so many characters having interactions that I should do an efficient chart. The number of nodes went to like ten at one point. That is when I decided to go with a children’s book because they sally go along with the triangulation of characters and I could handle three. It was very tedious when I was trying to figure out how exactly I wanted to do the nodes. If I wanted to make them open ended of specifically who was talking to who. I eventually decided to make the nodes one sided. I enjoyed this project though because of the free reign that we were given to choose a text that meant something to us to analyze it.

Some of the analysis of social network analysis is that this gives the audience I visual of what they are reading and can show the interactions in a more clear form. If I take Pooh out of the chart then the chart is filled with holes. If I took Christopher Robin the chart would not change that much. An advantage of this analysis also comes with the idea that having a visual with a piece of reading material. This advantage grows more when the visual can show new ideas about a particular piece of writing. Another advantage is that this can being forth new discussion and dialogue about certain text. The last advantage is that this type of analysis can be done more efficiently with the technology that we have now.

A disadvantage of this social network analysis is that sometimes the material sometimes will be shown to just prove the thesis of the text. This type of disadvantage comes with the territory because usually visuals have this type of disadvantage because of the biased nature of text. Another disadvantage of this type of analysis is that this can be very tedious work. Trying to do this by hand especially with longer text can be very difficult because of the vast size of the dialogue available. This is not a bad thing, but still it is a disadvantage because it is very time consuming.