For this assignment, I chose to map out the major characters of the famous Grey’s Anatomy. I decided to connect the characters based on blood relatives, spouses, children, lovers and friends. I started by entering each character at a time and connecting them as I went along. This was a longer process than I anticipated. all the characters are connected in some way which made the mapping difficult. I enjoyed putting this together and digging deeper to find how everyone was connected.
For this assignment, I had to use the Kumu organizational tool to make a relationship web. I decided to make a web based on my family tree. I made myself the main connector and then branched the web to have my mother’s family on one side and my father’s family on the other. As you can see, my mother’s side of the family is much larger than my fathers. She has more siblings and some are already married with children of their own.
It was relatively easy to make the web through Kumu. I simply made an account, selected which web structure I wanted to use, and began inserting connectors. I did have some initial trouble trying to make the first element since I was in this weird tutorial version and didn’t know how to end it. However, once I started, it became easy. I then saved the web, took a screenshot of it, and uploaded it onto this blog post. I first tried to embed the web with a link through Kumu, but for some reason, it wouldn’t work. However, the image embedded here does the job! Another fun assignment with DS106!
For my first novel assignment, I did the Harness Relationships assignment for 5 stars. In this assignment, you are asked to use the website Kumu to create a web that connects settings, people and events from your chosen novel. The novel I did, Sea of Rust, has a motley crew of characters and a few key settings throughout the story so I was excited to piece them all together in a huge web.
To start, I went back through the novel and made a list of what stuck out to me as the most prominent characters. I did the same for settings. For the events, I relied on my memory and summed them up in a few major events because there were so many over the course of the novel. I included all the most important bots in the life of the main character, Brittle, as well as her original human owner, Braydon and his wife that owned her after his death, Madison.
I separated the bots into different groups based on how she knew them. Mercer and Murka are connected because they were buddies and comrades who originally hunted Brittle but became part of a group with her after NIKE 14 was invaded. 19 and Doc were introduced in NIKE 14 so they’re connected to this location, as well as Brittle, because they are friends to her (which is rare for Brittle). I put Rebekah and her envoy in their own section as well, including One and Two who acted as spare parts for her, and Herbert, a bodyguard. She’s connected to Isaac because she is part of the collective whole who acted as “Isaac” and who will become a new collective Tacitus to save the world. Her goal is also included on the web, to reach Isaactown and reconvene with the other fragments of the collective whole.
The events I included are the invasion of NIKE 14 by CISSUS, the murder of Madison, the questioning/inquisition of the Mad Bots and the final battle at Marion. I tried to tie each event to a location or a party involved. The murder of Madison was included because it’s a traumatic event for Brittle, even though she seems to be in denial of the emotional connection she has to the moment. The other three events are important arcs in the story.
Me trying to detangle my mess of a web.
This assignment was honestly more difficult than expected. The web mapping interface takes a while to get used to and it took me a while to figure out how to color each element differently and connect people or places to more than one object. There isn’t much online help to guide you through it, because this website is usually used for different functions. However, I figured it out through trial and error and managed to make a functional web. One thing I found out, however, is that when you share your web, there is no way to pin down your elements in the web. So when I went to view my shared web, the pieces of the web were tangled, moved around and the label I added was out of place. Because of his, I screenshotted my final product so that I could share it the way I intended it to look. If you made a web as well and managed to make the pieces lock into place, let me know!
For this week’s web assignments, I decided to play around with Kumu, a online app used to create diagrams and designs. When using Kumu, I quickly learned that the tool was indeed powerful, although I learned that mostly through breaking things rather than creating them. I then decided to make a basic replication of a chart that I found online that mapped out different modern forms of government, and once I stuck to the idea I found that I was barely scratching the surface with what Kumu was truly capable of. That being said, I am proud of what I was able to accomplish with the software – even though it’s just a polished copy.
For this map, you’re looking at the many connections within artists not even necessarily connected by genre. Many of these artists overlap in the music they create and have made connections over time by maturing as artists, learning different and unique styles. I have a strong obsession with music so making this was a joy. I created a network between these people by linking them depending on if they were featured, collaborated, or covered a song by a connected artist. I added tags to differentiate these characteristics but I’m not sure you can see them unless you click on the circles. I also added photos to make it easy to remember some people. Kumu is a very easy tool to use and could help you make even more important networks, for instance, a family tree or the dynamic of a job or organization.
When was the last time you looked through your phone’s contact list? I mean really LOOKED. Not scrolled. Not perused for through for names saved next to eggplant, peach, and heart emojis, but really looked. Stopped. Thought about the connection you have with that person; why that person is in your phone to begin with and why after meeting once 3 years ago, you still save the number?
Keeping this in mind, I decided to map my phone contacts, connecting each person who introduced me to another person. In many cases several people intertwined, but I keep it as simple as possible, who was my first or main point of contact.
(works best to use zoom function)
The result left me with a dancing dandelion of connections and I don’t think anything could illustrate the fragility, persistence, and beauty of friendship better.
For my first ever assignment bank assignment I decided to tackle the Harness Relationships: Make a Map with Kumu. I had never used Kumu before but I had seen people use it before and was curious to check it out. Seeing it in the assignment bank I was excited to try it out.  I remembered people saying Kumu could be difficult to use so I started by going through all the tutorials for how to create a map. Kumu offers three types of general maps, the assignment bank specified a connections map so I selected that type of map. I decided to have my maps of connections tie into the secret agent theme of the semester. For my map I created a character map of the characters in a James Bond as a way to explore the story of a film.
I chose to look at the James Bond film Dr. No, now I have actually never seen this Bond film before and I purposefully chose one that I had not seen. I decided to do this because I wanted to see how much character descriptions alone could help you explore the story itself. Now I primarily used Wikipedia to inform me on the characters in the film. I know people often have reservations about using Wikipedia as reference however I have found that particularly dedicated fans keep a close eye on monitoring correct information on these pages. I also went into the pages edit history and checked through the history to see that it is well maintained. Another reason was that many people when they want a basic idea of a story tend to google the film and read the summary, so I was exploring how some one casually looking up the film could understand the story through it’s characters. (Although for my own part in trying to discern story from just character I only read character synopsis and did not read the plot. Only after I had finished my map did I go back and read the plot to see how much of the story I was able to discern. )
So as I started my Kumu map I decided to keep the descriptions for each character brief as well as the connections making it more essential to look at both the characters and the connections. So in Kumu each character is represented as an “element” or a little circle and the lines that go from element to element are “connections.” Â For instance here is my example element for the character James Bond. (The lines extending out of frame are connections to other characters.)
For each character I included a brief introduction about who they were, I also included the actor who portrayed them. In the case of frequently repeating  characters in the franchise I included who else played the character in other films but specified the actor for this particular film.
I also went ahead and had to play around to figure out how to upload images and decided I wanted to keep the over all map minimalist in color after playing around with color in the Kumu edit section. From there is was all about imputing each character as an element. Once I had a bunch of floating elements going I had to go back and trace how each character was connected. After I created all the connections I went back and double checked to make sure everything was correct.
I was surprised how much about the plot I really understood just through the character summaries. I was able to figure out the events took place in Kingston Jamica, who worked for the villian Dr. No, and who made it out alive. Admittedly though when I read just the summaries of the characters as a group there were some missing gaps in relationships that I only got when I dug deeper in the process of finding images for the characters. For instance the short description for the character Honey Ryder focuses on her occupation but does not inherently link her to other characters. However when you click into the Honey Ryder page it becomes clear she has a romantic relationship with James Bond. Overall though I was able to discern a good deal about the film just through analyzing the characters relationships with one another.
Finally here is my final product! Kumu is a interesting tool to play around with but even more fun when it’s completed because the bigger picture is present. Unfortunately the way Kumu embeds in a site is rather small and changing the dimensions distorted the map so I suggest looking at it through Kumu’s site to get the full effect. (Warning though there site can be a bit slow to load sometimes.)
For this assignment I decided to map my family. Unfortunately there are 180 in my family so I went with the next best, The Stark family. You might recognize this dysfunctional family from the hit TV show Game of Thrones.
The assignment asks us to organize information into a web map. I chose to organize the lifecycle of rocks into a web map.
In this assignment I organized existing information about the relationship between rocks and their environment to create a map.
I chose to base my map around the rock lifecycle because my major is geology. This cycle can be complex with regard to all of the thermodynamic, applied stress and chemical reactions, etc. But all of those reactions can be represented by such a simple two dimensional web map.
This assignment asked that  you take some story or situation and create a map for everyone involved. I decided to take this opportunity to map out a book that I had to read for my American Realism class called The Marrow of Tradition. It’s a really good book, and I highly recommend anyone read it if they’re interested. The biggest problem with the book was the large amount of characters involved. Many things are happening all at once throughout the course of the events, and everyone is related to everyone else somehow. So, I decided to take advantage of this assignment and finally map out the characters according to a list that my professor had given us to help in our reading. I’m going to send this link to the professor, too, so hopefully her future classes won’t be as confused.
This assignment, more than anything else, took a lot of time. I didn’t get every single character — just the ones on my professor’s list — but it was still incredibly extensive. I used Kumu, as the assignment requests, and put in everyone according to their race (since that’s the main point of the book). It was really cool to finish all of this data and sit back to see the connections. Major Carteret is connected to everyone in some way, so he is the unintentional center of this diagram, as the circles and lines shift according to where everything is. Seeing this sort of map really helps with understanding the role each character has and what relation they have to those around them.
When was the last time you looked through your phone’s contact list? I mean really LOOKED. Not scrolled. Not perused for through for names saved next to eggplant, peach, and heart emojis, but really looked. Stopped. Thought about the connection you have with that person; why that person is in your phone to begin with and why after meeting once 3 years ago, you still save the number?
