An Introduction to Network Visualization for Television Studies: Models and Practical Applications

With the advent of open-source digital tools, abstract models have been consistently adopted in humanistic research and they have proven to be useful for many purposes: for predictive and descriptive analysis using quantitative or qualitative models, for database management, as in the case of relational models, and for modeling cultural dynamics (Gabor 2008). Among others, television scholars embraced such a trend in cultural analytics and digital humanities, by notably adopting modeling practices for assessing viewers behaviors (Wonneberger 2009) or for measuring qualitative variations in narrative ecosystems (Pescatore, Rocchi 2018). Drawing upon this digital turn, the following paper aims to discuss the advantages, challenges and limits of adopting visual models for the analysis of large corpora in television studies. Examples of data visualization will be notably shown here, in application to a sample database of anthology TV series extracted through the Wikidata Query Service. A visual model available on the platform RAWGraph will be proposed as a means to identify flows of production and distribution, by looking at the country of origin and at the industrial players involved in the formation of such a network. More than on actual modeling, we will therefore focus on model usage for academic research.