For this project, I wanted to combine my love of literature, sociology, and data science. More specifically, I have had an interest in social networks since my college days, and given recent events, representing how different agents are connected is increasingly important. So I developed a character network of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is my favorite Shakespeare play. If you haven’t read it yet and enjoy something fairly whimsical, I would recommend it!
In the following post, I will first go through the basics of a network. Then I will briefly go over the code I used to get my data in the format I needed. Then I go over the code I used to create and customize the above graph. All of the resources that I used are linked at the bottom. I hope this tutorial is helpful! Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions! Happy graphing!
All of the code can be found on my GitHub repo.
Objectives
To explain the basics of how to create a visually appealing network graph using Python’s Networkx package and Plotly
To illustrate an example of an application of network graphing and some data cleaning steps I took (since I was dealing with natural language data, the data cleaning is much more complex than what I can cover in this post)
To provide some tips, example code, and resources