About the project

Star Wars is one of the most impactful popular culture franchises of the 20th and 21st centuries, deeply embedded in the coming-of-age narrative format of transmission of values and identity de/re/construction and negotiation. I grew up with the original trilogy - I remember watching Episode VI in one of my hometown's well-known cinemas. Sitting on my dad's coat so that I could see past the person sitting in front of me, I was 4 years old and amazed. To nourish my own curiosity, I started looking into the narratives that developed over the nine films through various perspectives. To do so, I used python and a few visualisation libraries. Finding the information and organising the datasets was easy thanks to the great community of fans who compiled various data and sources and published it online.

"There is a disturbance..." is a sunburst chart to hierarchically represent the gender and species distribution among main characters.

"Size matters not" is all about the characters' physical size and displays the information as a standard stacked bar chart.

"I sense a presence..." is my favourite, as it represents the character screentime with a sankey diagram. It shows the intricacy of recurring characters' narratives. The selection tool allows for alternative focus.

For the time being, these visualisations are purely quantitative depictions of various occurrences. Most plots are interactive and allow to save the visualisation in png (the tools are in the top right corner), so feel free to play with it, use and share the viz!
I'd be happy if you let me know how and where you used it or plan to do so, so don't hesitate to say hello!
I hope you enjoy it.

Jelena