Uncovering the Narrative Structure of “Breaking Bad” Through a Multi-Dimensional Quantitative Analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2421-454X/14503Parole chiave:
TV series, Quantitative analysis, Breaking Bad, Narrative structureAbstract
The quantitative analysis of TV series has so far focused on the interactions among characters, typically employing a network model. However, such analyses can exploit additional information extracted as manual annotation from the series. That additional information can help us obtain a more complete view of the series narrative structure, accounting for the sequence of scenes and shots. In this paper, we propose an analysis of the TV series "Breaking Bad" that relies on the measurement of locations and scenes as well as the speech and video presence of individual characters. We also exploit those data to measure the degree of concentration achieved by locations and individual characters. We observe a consistent pattern for most variables, which highlight the stylistic characteristics of the series.
Riferimenti bibliografici
Alberich, Ricardo, Miro-Julia, Joe and Rosselló, Francesc (2002). “Marvel universe looks almost like a real social network”. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.cond-mat/0202174
Bandirali, Luca and Terrone, Enrico (2019). “Un antieroe è per sempre. quando il protagonista è l’antagonista di se stesso”. Segnocinema XXXIX (218): 11-21.
Basner, Mathias (2021). “Who was the best friend?”. Significance, 18(5):40–43.
Bazzan, Ana Lucia Cetertich (2020). “Similar Yet Different: the Structure of Social Networks of Characters in Seinfeld, Friends, How I met Your Mother, and The Big Bang Theory”. Revista de Informática Teórica e Aplicada, 27(2):66–80.
Bernardelli, Andrea (2016). “Etica criminale. le trasformazioni della figura dell’antieroe nella serialità televisiva”. Between, VI (11): 1-19.
Beveridge, Andrew and Shan, Jie (2016). “Network of thrones”. Math Horizons, 23(4):18–22.
Bost, Xavier; Labatut, Vincent; Gueye, Serigne and Linares, Georges (2016). Narrative smooth- ing: dynamic conversational network for the analysis of tv series plots. In 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), Subrahmanian, Vs Siva S and Rokne, Jon (Eds.). 1111–1118. IEEE.
Bost, Xavier, Labatut, Vincent and Linares, Georges (2020). “Serial speakers: a dataset of tv series”. In 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), Calzolari, Nicoletta; Béchet, Frédéric; Blache, Philippe; Choukri, Khalid; Cieri, Christopher; Declerck, Thierry; Goggi, Sara; Isahara, Hitoshi; Maegaard, Bente; Mariani, Joseph;
Mazo, Hélène; Moreno, Asuncion; Odijk, Jan; Piperidis, Stelios. 4256–4264.
Canby, Vincent (1999). “From the humble mini-series comes the magnificent megamovie”. New York Times, 1 (2).
Checcaglini, Chiara (2018). Breaking bad: la chimica del male: storia, temi, stile. Milano: Mimesis (ebook).
DeFino, Dean J. (2013). The HBO effect. USA: Bloomsbury Publishing.
De Pascalis, Ilaria Antonella and Pescatore, Guglielmo (2018). “Dalle narrazioni estese agli ecosistemi narrativi”. In Ecosistemi narrativi: dal fumetto alle serie tv, edited by Guglielmo Pescatore, 19-30. Carocci editore.
Dusi, Nicola and Grignaffini, Giorgio (2020). Capire le serie TV. Generi, stili, pratiche. Roma: Carocci Editore.
Faucette, Brian (2013). “Taking control: Male angst and the re-emergence of hegemonic masculinity in breaking bad”. In Breaking Bad: Critical essays on the contexts, politics, style, and reception of the television series, edited by David Pierson, 73-86. Lexington Books.
Fronzetti Colladon, Andrea and Naldi, Maurizio (2018). “Concentration indices for dialogue dominance phenomena in tv series: The case of the big bang theory”. In International Conference on the Statistical Analysis of Textual Data, edited by Iezzi, Domenica Fioredistella; Mayaffre, Damon, and Misuraca, Michelangelo, 55–64. Springer.
Fronzetti Colladon, Andrea and Naldi, Maurizio (2019). “Predicting the performance of tv series through textual and network analysis: The case of big bang theory”. PloS one, 14(11). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225306.
Gao, Jianbo; Jockers, Matthew; Laudun, John and Tangherlini, Timothy (2016). “A multiscale theory for the dynamical evolution of sentiment in novels”. In 2016 International Conference on Behavioral, Economic and Socio-cultural Computing (BESC), edited by Li, Gang; Demazeau, Yves; Xu, Guandong; Wang, Paul; Wang, Leon S. L. and Liu, Guanfeng, 1–4. IEEE.
Grasso, Aldo, Penati, Cecilia (2016). La nuova fabbrica dei sogni. miti e riti delle serie tv americane. Milano: Il Saggiatore.
Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence culture. New York University Press.
Labatut, Vincent and Bost, Xavier (2019). “Extraction and analysis of fictional character networks: A survey”. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 52(5): 1–40.
Laine, Charles R. (1995). “The Herfindahl-Hirschman index: a concentration measure taking the consumer’s point of view”. The Antitrust Bulletin, 40(2): 423–432.
Martin, Brett (2018). Difficult men: dai Soprano a Breaking Bad, gli antieroi delle serie tv. Minimum Fax.
Martin, Sara (2015). “La poetica degli spazi in Breaking Bad”, Series 1 (2): 151-158. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2421-454X/5900
Mittell, Jason (2017). Complex tv. Teoria e tecnica dello storytelling delle serie tv. Roma: Minimum Fax.
Moretti, Franco (2011). Network theory, plot analysis. Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg.
Naldi, Maurizio (2003). “Concentration indices and Zipf’s law”. Economics Letters, 78(3):329–334.
Nalisnick, Eric T. and Baird, Henry S. (2013). “Character-to-character sentiment analysis in shakespeare’s plays”. In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), edited by Schuetze, Hinrich; Fung, Pascale and Poesio Massimo, 479–483. Sofia, Bulgaria
Newman, Mark E. and Girvan, Michelle (2004). “Finding and evaluating community structure in networks”. Physical review E, 69(2). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.69.026113
Palmieri, Attilio (2018). “Pay tv statunitense e contrazione dei formati narrativi: ecosistemi compressi?” In Ecosistemi narrativi: dal fumetto alle serie tv, edited by Guglielmo Pescatore, 109-128. Roma: Carocci editore.
Pescatore, Guglielmo (2018). Ecosistemi narrativi: dal fumetto alle serie tv. Roma: Carocci editore.
Pescatore, Guglielmo and Innocenti, Veronica (2012). Le nuove forme della serialità televisiva. Storia, linguaggio e temi. Bologna: ArchetipoLibri.
Pescatore, Guglielmo and Rocchi, Marta (2018). “Dalla definizione ai modelli degli ecosistemi narrativi. Prospettive di ricerca”. In Ecosistemi narrativi: dal fumetto alle serie tv, edited by Guglielmo Pescatore, 229-244. Roma: Carocci editore.
Pierson, David (2013). Breaking Bad: Critical essays on the contexts, politics, style, and reception of the television series. Lexington Books.
Rhoades, Stephen A. (1993). “The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index”. Fed. Res. Bull., 79:188.
Rocchi, Marta and Chiarello, Jessica (2019). “Insights into serial narratives trough qualitative modelling techniques”, Series 5 (1): 23-31. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2421-454X/5900
Sepinwall, Alan (2013). The Revolution was Televised: From Buffy to Breaking Bad-the People and the Shows that Changed TV Drama Forever. Black Inc.
Tan, Melody S., Ujum, Ephrance A. and Ratnavelu, Kurunathan (2014). “A character network study of two Sci-Fi TV series”. AIP Conference Proceedings, 1588: 246–251.
Thompson, Kristin (2012). Storytelling. Forme del racconto tra cinema e televisione. Rubbettino.
Thompson, Robert J. (1997). Television’s second golden age: From Hill Street Blues to ER. Syracuse University Press.
Tralli, Lucia (2018) “Pratiche dell’audience nell’ecosistema narrativo” In Ecosistemi narrativi: dal fumetto alle serie tv, edited by Guglielmo Pescatore, 187-212. Roma: Carocci editore.
Zhang, Lingfei; Li, Chunfang; Fan, Luyu and Shi, Minyong (2018). “Analysis of character relationship in tv series based on complex network”. In 2018 IEEE/ACIS 17th International Conference on Computer and Information Science (ICIS), edited by Pries-Heje, Jan; Ram, Sudha and Rosemann, Michael, 723–727. IEEE.
Zhao, Yanjun; Wang, Tao; Wang, Peng; Hu, Wei; Du, Yangzhou; Zhang, Yimin and Xu, Guangyou (2007). “Scene segmentation and categorization using NCuts”. In 2007 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, edited by Bhanu, Bir and Ratha, Nalini, 1–7. IEEE.
TV series
Breaking Bad (2008-2013)
Breaking Bad: Original Minisodes (2009-2011)
Grey’s anatomy (2005-)
The Sopranos (1999-2007)
The X-Files (1993-2002)
Downloads
Pubblicato
Come citare
Fascicolo
Sezione
Licenza
Copyright (c) 2022 Maurizio Naldi, Paola Dalla Torre
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/3.0/88x31.png)
Questo articolo è soggetto a licenza Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.