I decided, for consistency's sake, to continue to experiment with the same text I've been working with in several previous practicums, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

For this exercise, I decided to chart not who spoke to whom, but who spoke about whom, and I defined my parameters of "speaking about" someone as saying something which either indicated an action the figure was involved in, or indicating something about the figure's character/personality/background.

Based on part 1 of the novel (the first 35 pages or so), here's what that list of interactions looked like (speaker in the left-hand column, subject in the right):

Once I'd compiled this list, I attempted to manually graph these interactions (I can't say this was a smooth, or quick, process, and I can't say I'm visually satisfied with the results). There are a lot of edges in this graph. Blue dots indicate characters who are spoken about (or whose speech is reported through Jake Barnes' narration). Green arrows indicate reciprocal relationships (both parties speak about one another). Bill Gorton, who plays a major role in later parts of the book, appears here only when Jake reports on something Bill said about himself, so he's connected to no one else.

The major problems I ran into (besides trying to work out any kind of spatial arrangement that made this legible) was the subjectivity of what constituted "speaking about" someone else--was merely acknowledging their existence by saying their name enough to merit a record, or did they need to do more than that (I opted for the latter)? Another pressing issue was what to do with Jake's paraphrasing of others' comments--did those count as Jake's words, or the original speaker's (again, I chose the latter)?