Summery and Final Conclusions

In this project we tried to answer some questions regard Game of Throne series by analytic examination of the transcripts mainly by counting the words.

As we know the plot and watched all the episodes, we were interested about how much our research will reflect the story that we know. In other words, we wanted to examine the correspondence between the plot (dominant characters/house/gender) and the amount of spoken words (mainly).

Our first focus was to answer the question regarding the dominant gender as it is not so obvious. On the one hand, the plot of Game of Throne exist in a very patriarchal society which is organized in kingdoms that inherit the crown and is focuses on wars that involve soldiers and knights, and on the other hand, as the series plot develops the “ladies” retain more power, take strategic positions and even become the heads of main cities and armies.

We expected to see this progress in the results - a growing part to the female characters in the text. But to our surprise the growth wasn’t significant enough and even there is a big drop down in the female part in the last season (in which almost all the rulers are women), that place them right where they started in the first season. That is, in general point of view of all the female characters as a group. In the personal aspect we did see that 2 of the top 3 talkers are dominant women who located in key roles in the story, although the first place belongs to a man who talks almost twice than they are. These results are supported by the word cloud that presents very mannish language that dominate the text and visualize the gap between the part given to male and female in the text.  -> Pretty surprising results to a series which is sometimes considered as feminist.

In the other two section of the research, personal and houses, the results were quiet expected.

• The houses distribution reflected the main houses (families) that are most powerful and dominant to which most of the main characters belongs. In addition, the houses distribution by seasons separately helps to see more profound picture that includes the smaller houses and its part in the series.

• The personal distribution enables to see the progress of each character personally throughout the seasons and to make some interesting comparisons within groups of characters by executing different intersections. This overall comparison spotlight Tyrion Lannister as the character who speaks the most in a very large gap from the rest of the characters. Although Tyrion considered to be very smart, big talker and his words are his power in the story, this fact is still unexpected, especially with this unquestionable gap. Moreover, it reveals that the “stars” of the series sometime speaks less than other characters with advisory roles, which means that main characters don’t necessarily get their “main” title for their number of words (lines). But, in the same time, all the main characters are easily discovered by a quick look at the graph.

We tried to visualize the collected information as best as we can to answer our questions and maybe a lot of other questions based on the transcripts by enabling multiple forms of presentations with flexible ability to choose specific intersection of as many criterion as we could. We think that making the collected organized data accessible is also a big meaningful part of a digital humanities project.

For the full data in a form of JSON includes also the aliases and the specific lines of each character look in our git (which also includes all the csvs that we created from this JSON) or press the “Download json” button.