Social network analysis of character interaction in the Stargate and Star Trek television series

Abstract

This paper undertakes a social network analysis of two science fiction television series, Stargate and Star Trek. Television series convey stories in the form of character interaction, which can be represented as “character networks”. We connect each pair of characters that exchanged spoken dialogue in any given scene demarcated in the television series transcripts. These networks are then used to characterize the overall structure and topology of each series. We find that the character networks of both series have similar structure and topology to that found in previous work on mythological and fictional networks. The character networks exhibit the small-world effects but found no significant support for power-law. Since the progression of an episode depends to a large extent on the interaction between each of its characters, the underlying network structure tells us something about the complexity of that episode’s storyline. We assessed the complexity using techniques from spectral graph theory. We found that the episode networks are structured either as (1) closed networks, (2) those containing bottlenecks that connect otherwise disconnected clusters or (3) a mixture of both.