The Method

When analyzing a social network, you first have to define your focus. You can have a friendship network (who are each person’s friends), an advice network (who does each person seek for advice), or a communication network (with whom does each person communicate each day), for example. In order to study these networks, you have to build questionnaires and ask each person of the network to fill them.

After debating for a while, we got to a consensus on what we were going to analyze — interactions. Since this is a TV show and we can’t really ask characters anything, we defined interactions as every verbal, physical or gestural action between them.

I got together with two of my colleagues for watching the first season and start collecting data — with each episode lasting sixty minutes on average, this was no easy task for a single person. One of my colleagues had never watched Game of Thrones, and the other one had only watched the first season and a few episodes of the second one. This was crucial in not biasing our analysis of the series, since I had already watched all of the three seasons.

While watching each episode, we noted down the interactions between the 120 characters and how many times they occurred. After all the magic (i.e., Excel and Gephi analysis) was done, we got to some pretty interesting conclusions.

The Socialites

Like in real life, if you know and talk to a lot of people, you have a bigger relevance in a network. The degree measure in SNA translates how many interactions each character had with other characters, which can also translate the importance of the character in the network. In this way, the most prominent characters are also the ones who have more “air time”.

Degree Analysis — The bigger each character’s circle, the bigger his/hers relevance.

Confirming our guess at the beginning, the first season of Game of Thrones is all about Eddard Stark. However, it is interesting to see other characters arise that didn't seem that relevant for a first time watcher, like Arya Stark. It’s also interesting to see that, like in our perception of the series, The King of the Seven Kingdoms, Robert Baratheon, isn't that relevant for the plot.