Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2010 March 9

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March 9

Narrative chart

Has anyone attempted one of these: [1] for Lost? Aaadddaaammm (talk) 10:28, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Well, a quick google search only returned that same site and features on it in blogs, so I don't think so, although I didn't do the most accurate search. Chevymontecarlo. 16:30, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

The nearest thing I can find is this on Lostpedia. That site has more Lost information than any other I've found, btw. --Richardrj ^{talk email} 16:37, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

(Edit conflicts) FWIW, nothing found via Google, though the suggestion is made in comment #10 (scroll down, look on the right) here. Looks like you could be in first - go for it!

On a related note, xkcd's use of "narrative chart" for this device seems to be a new coinage, but is the device itself xkcd's invention? It seems obvious, but great original ideas sometimes do (c.f. Huxley's comment on Natural Selection, "how exceedingly stupid not to have thought of that."), and cursory searching around the concepts of Event chain diagrams, Gantt charts, etc don't throw up an obvious antecedant. If nothing else, it would seem to be a useful aid for a writer planning a story.87.81.230.195 (talk) 16:43, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

The concept seems somewhat related to that of business process mapping, but to me it seems more like a joke than anything else, to show how convoluted the plots of these stories are. --Richardrj ^{talk email} 16:57, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Not at all, and it's not new to XKCD. See here for a precedent. I don't think it's given a specific name, but is simply a form of information design. 64.235.97.146 (talk) 17:34, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the replies so far - I'd also found that pretty half-arsed image on lostpedia, was hoping someone had had a better go at it. Although I'm sure I won't actually do it, is there any kind of software around that could help me out if I decided to make a similar graph? That precedent linked, seems to be a war march? It's quite different, as the x and y axis show space, rather than time in the xkcd graph. It would indeed be interesting to see if anyone can find another real example of this. Aaadddaaammm (talk) 18:16, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Feel free to poke around in #xkcd and see if anyone there knows offhand how it was made - a lot of the ops there are good friends of Randall, and he may answer the question himself if he's around. Coreycubed (talk) 18:38, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

What would make the Lost chart more fully arsed, in your view? —Tamfang (talk) 19:41, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

_{I think the idea would be to make it less-arsed? Coreycubed (talk) 20:44, 9 March 2010 (UTC)}

Actually, arsedness is the level of effort put into something - hence, "I can't be arsed" and "half-arsed" both imply less than full effort. So, fully arsed would be the desired approach. Vimescarrot (talk) 01:52, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Actually, that's completely OR rubbish. A person can be either arsed or not arsed, but if they can be arsed, they never say so; there's no such expression as "I am sufficiently arsed to do this". They only ever talk about a lack of arsedness, as in the typical "I can't be arsed to do this". As for ideas, arsedness only ever applies in the case of exactly 50%. The concept of something being "three-quarters arsed" or "third-arsed", or, indeed, "fully arsed" - well, these are non-concepts. Now I suppose you'll go off and find some citations from reputable sources to prove me wrong. I guess I could go to that trouble too, but .... you know the rest.  :) -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 20:33, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

It reminds me of this. Woogee (talk) 18:57, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

XKCD certainly didn't invent this even for films; here's one for Terminator from a year before his cartoon[2]. The idea seems derived from a variety of sources: scenario diagram as in XML (e.g.[3]) which derive from business process diagrams, rock family tree[4][5], graphical timetables (discussed at length by Edward R Tufte), flow chart, Feynman diagram, Minard, etc. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.41.14.1 (talk) 20:22, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Well somebody up there mentioned Gantt charts, and one of the easiest ways to make those is with Microsoft Project. Not particularly glamorous, I know :) TomorrowTime (talk) 23:56, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Some interesting and useful replies (speaking for myself, not for the OP Aaadddaaammm!) I thought of Minard's Napoleonic War chart, and I'm familiar with Pete Frame's Rock Family Trees, but hadn't thought them quite analagous to xkcd's application. (On second thoughts, I was wrong about Minard - it's very close). I still think it likely that some writers have used just such a chart for plotting stories, but I suppose such uses have a low likelihood of being published. 87.81.230.195 (talk) 16:51, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

It would be simple but time-consuming to make these - on some squared paper you have a row for each scene, and a column for each actor. You put a tick in the appropriate box whenever an actor is in a particular scene. A graph of number of appearances against time for each actor would show who was relevant for each part of the story, and which actors were active at the same time. A further thing you could do would be to create a network diagram (there is a name for something similar that was popular decades ago in social psychology for friendship preferances - cannot remember it) with links between the actors whose thickness is in proportion to the number of scenes they are both in. I hope I'm not encouraging lonely couch potatoes to waste their lives doing this. 78.146.52.206 (talk) 10:56, 12 March 2010 (UTC)