Paper detail

I will be there for you: six friends in a clique

Network science has proved useful in analyzing structure and dynamics of social networks in several areas. This paper aims at analyzing the relationships of characters in the sitcom Friends. In particular, two important aspects are investigated. First, how are the structure of the communities. Second, not only static structure of the graphs and causality relationships are investigated, but also temporal aspects. Also, this sitcom is frequently associated with distinguishing facts such as: all six characters are equally prominent; it has no dominant storyline; and friendship as surrogate family. This paper uses tools from network theory to check whether these and other assumptions can be quantified and proved correct. The main findings regarding the centrality and temporal aspects are: patterns in graphs representing different time slices of the show change; overall, degrees of the six friends are indeed nearly the same; however, in different situations (thus graphs), the magnitudes of degree centrality do change; betweenness centrality differs significantly for each character thus some characters are better connectors than others; there is a high difference regarding degrees of the six friends versus the rest of the characters, which points to a centralized network; there are strong indications that the six friends are part of a surrogate family. As for the presence of groups within the network, methods of different natures were investigated aiming at detecting groups (communities) in networks representing different time slices as well as the network of all episodes. Such methods were compared (pairwise and also using various metrics, including plausibility). The multilevel method performs reasonably in general. Also, it stands out that those methods do not agree very much, resulting in groups that are very different from method to method.