Movies vs Plays - Datastories

Author: Gergely Odor

The visualization compares the networks of character interactions in plays by Nobel laureates in literature, and Oscar-winning or nominated movies from the same year. The networks were created by processing the scripts and measuring the number of interactions between every character pair of characters. Since the plays had fewer characters than the movies in all cases, we took the subgraph spanned by the characters with the most lines, so that the resulting movie network has the same number of nodes as the corresponding play network. The networks were visualized using the Fruchterman-Reingold force-directed algorithm, with the location of the nodes with the highest/lowest y-coordinates (marked with a white circle) corresponding to the density value of the network. The visualization shows that in 5 cases the play networks a had higher density than the movie network. In the remaining 2 cases, the movie networks had a higher density, however, these were also the cases when the movies were only nominated, but did not win the award.