This data visualization is a network analysis made with Gephi and embedded with the help of Gephi Lite to embed within this webpage. What is being mapped in our beautiful web is a relationship map of X-Men characters who had some sort of romantic interaction with another character (from physical contact to stating “I love you”). The source I used documented a variety of character interactions over the span of a selected amount of comic issues (#250-290). I manipulated the data to simply track all romantic interactions between characters because Gephi did not have an easy way to differentiate types of relationships. It is also why you may see commas between some of the character names. I did a lot of work to clean up and separate the data to the best of my abilities, but I couldn’t separate the individuals categorized under some existing relationships, which is why you may find a node representing multiple people. I wanted to use some form of network analysis which is why I chose this data set because I thought it might be a fun way to represent this sheet.

In this website I wanted to keep it simple and edited both the colors in the design of the subdomain and my embedded graph to match one another. This method of mapping the network can give a better display of the romantic community interactions happening throughout these issues. It also better displays who receives the most romantic gestures displayed with larger nodes (based on in-degree). This display of data falls more into the realm of Digital Humanities than data science through its use of interactive features and implementation within a website. However, digital humanities within itself is not independent of data science; it simply expands it.