Game of Thrones Social Network
In this article, mathematicians ingeniously crafted a social graph of all the Game of Thrones characters in order to determine the most powerful character in the show. Andrew J. Beveridge and Jie Shan took on this network science masterpiece by searching for patterns in relationship dynamics by parsing the Game of Thrones Books. Mind you, it is important to keep in mind this article came out in March 2016, so the power dynamics have drastically shifted since then due to newer episodes.
The creators of this work of art assigned each character a node, and connected two nodes together with an edge if the two characters appeared 15 words apart or less in the text. This means, according to this method, two nodes do not need a positive relationship in order to share an edge. Positivity/negativity is not identified. Therefore, the graph provides no information on overall structural balance, or strength/weaknesses of each relationship. In a show like Game of Thrones, it would be a daunting task to quantify and include these extra variables. Rather, these mathematicians essentially calculated which character is mentioned the most frequently in relation to other characters, in order to find the “main” characters. Triadic closure can be observed taking place in this data set as well. Several two adjacent edges, particularly the thicker ones with heavier weights, are often completed by a weaker third edge. This is triadic closure in the works. All in all, at that particular point in the series, this graph would seem perfectly reasonable to any Game of Throne fanatic – a masterpiece indeed.