The Lands of Ice and Fire

This work on HBO's Game of Thrones started it all. I was curious whether I could visualize the various narrative threads woven throughout the Game of Thrones HBO series; to do that, I had to create a custom dataset with episode and scene metadata, character data, and more. I've written about this project's background, initial thoughts, early work, and subsequent work on Medium:

This is a playground for that idea and others.

Note: click on any visualization to view the live version or open it in a new tab.

So that map?

The narrative chart started this project for Game of Thrones.

Narrative chart

Note: map contains spoilers. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

How many people are in every location?

Inspired by Hubble Image of Galaxy Cluster Converted Into Sound. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

Other Interfaces

In addition to the Narrative Chart visualization, I've also made two other interfaces for exploring datasets that are part of this project.

Episode Recap Viewer

A compilation of several of the visualizations below, where data is filtered by episode. Choose an episode to explore how characters accumulate screen time, the locations shown in the episode, wordcount distributions, the opening sequence locations, and more.

Game of Thrones Script Search

Search across all dialogue spoken throughout Game of Thrones. Search for text, phrases (in quotes), characters, or languages (e.g. Dothraki or High Valyrian).

Screen Time

Some of the easiest things to visualize are representations of when characters are on screen and where those characters are.

When are characters are on screen?

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Where do scenes take place?

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More specifically, where do scenes take place?

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When are "special" scenes?

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When do people die?

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When do weapons show up?

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Which Houses are on screen?

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How many characters are on screen?

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What about continuous on screen time?

Circles are color-coded by house. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

Cumulative Time

It's also fairly trivial to count how long characters are on screen (in total, by season, or per episode), how long they spend in certain locations, or the number of locations and time spent in each per episode.

How long are characters on screen?

Based on Andrew Reid's Horizontal Stacked Bar Chart. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

How long are characters in each season?

Based on Andrew Reid's Horizontal Stacked Bar Chart. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

How long are characters in each episode?

Based on Harry Stevens's Linear Regression for Scatter Plot. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

How long is spent in each location?

Based on Andrew Reid's Horizontal Stacked Bar Chart. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

How long is spent in each more-specific location?

Based on Andrew Reid's Horizontal Stacked Bar Chart. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

What percentage of characters' time is in each season?

Based on Mike Bostock's Normalized Stacked Bar Chart. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

How long are characters on screen relative to all time?

Based on takayuki's Treemap in d3 v4. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

How long are Houses on screen?

Based on Andrew Reid's Horizontal Stacked Bar Chart. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

What percentage of time do characters spend in various locations?

Based on Mike Bostock's Normalized Stacked Bar Chart. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

How many locations are in each episode?

Based on Andrew Reid's Horizontal Stacked Bar Chart. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

What's the gender balance of screen time per season?

Based on wpoely86's Diverging Stacked Bar Chart. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

What's the gender balance of screen time per episode?

Based on wpoely86's Diverging Stacked Bar Chart. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

What's the percent gender balance of screen time per episode?

Based on wpoely86's Diverging Stacked Bar Chart. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

Wordcount & Language

How many words do characters speak?

Based on Andrew Reid's Horizontal Stacked Bar Chart. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

How many words do characters speak in each season?

Based on Andrew Reid's Horizontal Stacked Bar Chart. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

How many words do characters in each House speak?

Based on Andrew Reid's Horizontal Stacked Bar Chart. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

What's the gender balance of words spoken per season?

Based on wpoely86's Diverging Stacked Bar Chart. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

What's the gender balance of words spoken per episode?

Based on wpoely86's Diverging Stacked Bar Chart. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

What's the percent gender balance of words spoken per episode?

Based on wpoely86's Diverging Stacked Bar Chart. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

What languages do characters speak?

Based on Andrew Reid's Horizontal Stacked Bar Chart. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

What languages are spoken in each episode?

Based on Andrew Reid's Horizontal Stacked Bar Chart. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

Co-Occurrence

Which characters are on screen together?

Based on Mike Bostock's Les Misérables Co-occurrence. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

... or as a force-directed network?

Based on heybignick's d3 v4 force-directed graph. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

... or as a chord diagram?

This chord diagram looks at character co-occurrences (two characters showing up in the same scene) across the show, the same data as above, just in a different representation.

Based on HenryLau's chord diagram on JSFiddle. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

Relationships

Which characters are connected?

Parent-child (solid gray), spouse (dashed blue), and killed by (solid black arrow) relationships shown. Based on Mike Bostock's Labeled Force Layout. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

Which characters are connected?

Parent-child (solid gray), spouse (dashed blue), and killed by (solid black arrow) relationships shown. Based on an HBO infographic. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

Which characters have sex?

Based on a Cool Material infographic. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

Actor Relationships

Which actors have been in movies with other Game of Thrones actors?

Data last pulled following Season 7. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

... or as a matrix?

Data last pulled following Season 7. Based on Mike Bostock's Les Misérables Co-occurrence. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

Lands of Ice and Fire Geography

I hadn't yet done much with the list of locations shown during the opening sequence of Game of Thrones. For this, I really wanted to be able to show the places on a map of Westeros, Essos, Sothyros, and Ulthos. To do that, I built upon what others had done, but converted a .png to .svg to .geojson. More on that below.

Is there a pattern in the opening locations?

Based on heybignick's d3 v4 force-directed graph. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

Could I show them in geographic space?

Based on the A Song of Ice and Fire Wiki geography. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

What about on a globe?

Adapted from Jason Davies' "Rotate the World". View in a new tab or click to view live version.

The opening sequences could look like this?

Adapted from Andrew Mollica's "World Tour along Flying Arcs". View in a new tab or click to view live version.

... or this?

Adapted from Andrew Mollica's "World Tour along Flying Arcs". View in a new tab or click to view live version.

Where have various characters travelled?

Adapted from Andrew Mollica's "World Tour along Flying Arcs". View in a new tab or click to view live version.

Prediction

Who will end up on the Iron Throne?

I'll write more about this one in the future, but this is a scatter plot of the slope and y-intercept of the linear regression of screen time per episode (see above) for each character. I've then unscientifically grouped the characters and labeled each group.

Putting a line in the sand now: I think Tyrion will be there in the end (first of his name).

Adapted from Harry Stevens's Linear Regression for Scatter Plot. View in a new tab or click to view live version.

Notes

The GitHub repository for this project has the data files used to make these visualizations. Code for each is also on GitHub, and a description of the project is on Medium:

Comments and suggestions are welcome on GitHub, Medium, or here.

h/t to Jason Davies for the clean style of this page.