Pie Spy

Research Report

By Lillian Lim, Member of The Venetial Project Team 

1. ABSTRACT:

     PieSpy is a tool created and designed in 2001 by current England, UK resident Paul Mutton. It is a form of IRC (Internet   Relay Chat) program that was initially restricted to analyzing online instant messaging chats, but can now generate a systematic model of characters within a specified writing (for example: characters within Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice), and displays the relationship between each character; providing a visual showing of the degree of overall growth and/or decay between individuals throughout a text.

2. DESCRIPTION:

     The PieSpy tool is a publicly accessible, downloadable program located on the Website http://www.jibble.org/shakespeare. It is a type of “bot” (also known as: textual analyzing program) that has been implemented into a Java applet through the means of another program known as “PircBot IRC Framework”. PieSpy was presented at the Information Visualization Conference in July 2004 and made appearances in Computer Weekly, c’t magazine, while its creator Paul Mutton was interviewed live on BBC Radio Kent.

     Upon entering the site, one is immediately introduced to Shakespeare and provided a brief biographical background of his life and his work. One is then introduced to the concept of PieSpy and how it detects social networks within a range of textual pieces. A multitude of diagrams ensue, displaying a snapshot of social networks, highlighting relationships between some of the characters within Shakespeare’s plays such as: “Frame 138 of Antony and Cleopatra” where the diagram reveals a strong social connection between Cleopatra and Mark Antony and a strong link between Mark Antony and Octavius Ceasar. By further scrolling down, the site offers additional still frames of Shakespeare’s other plays and some that may be visualized are: The Life of Henry the Fifth, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In addition to still frames, the site offers an example of animated diagrams and provides a video (mpeg4) file that was said to have encoded 4 still frames per second and lasts for an approximate 2.5 minutes. The main site lastly provides a number of links, contributed to the web page by other individuals, sharing Mutton’s interest in Shakespeare and PieSpy, who have turned all of Shakespeare’s plays into DivX avi (video) files so that the ordinary Internet surfer may have access to them.

     Based upon a heuristic approach toward character analysis, PieSpy concerns itself with network analysis by measuring the relationships between people. Used to illustrate Shakespearean social networks amongst characters within the plays, PieSpy reveals new sets of ideas about social structure, grouping tendency, relationship connectivity, and degree of intimacy and distance between a provided amount of people. Results may either be still shots or animated outputs that provide an evolutionary display noting relationship change. Outcomes include findings such as levels of closeness, by displaying short paths between characters, and having those paths bolded. Another outcome may reveal a level of distance, which is displayed by long and thin lines between each character. Some outcomes may even reveal complete alienation, and characters at this point do not have a line between them at all; hence displaying complete disconnection.

     Each social model, or relationship diagram in other words, features a degree of what is known as a “temporal decay” finding. The program achieves this by taking a snapshot of each scene of character interaction, and the general notion towards this idea is that some relationships deteriorate over time if it remains distant and/or inactive. Therefore, due to an analysis of prolonged activity, or a lack of it, contributes to a possible outcome of a character gradually becoming distant and ultimately disappearing from a diagram. The purpose of PieSpy is to provide an option for an individual to experiment, investigate, and evaluate possible initial notions or to confirm current inferences about relationships between a group of individuals.

3. COMMENTARY:

     The PieSpy program offers a multitude of additional options for textual and character analysis by providing a visual example of how relationships form, last, stay the same, grow distant, or ultimately become destroyed. This tool is mentioned on Paul Mutton’s web site as, “used by millions of people to communicate in real-time across the world” and enables those chats to become analyzable. Due to its continuous upgrades and software maturity, PieSpy is now used as a source that has elevated the visual and conceptual understanding of novels, plays, and other such texts, to a different and higher level.

     The PieSpy tool offers users a method of monitoring the overall interaction between sets or groups of characters, due to its online availability, at no cost to the user, PieSpy is both an easily accessible, efficient tool for study. This makes for both a quick and resourceful use. PieSpy allows viewers to determine facts or confirms notions about certain inferences, and the visualization aspect of the tool is of most importance because it prompts others toward making further inferences— which they may not have initially been inclined to think about— after seeing a visual display of results.

     The technical aspects of the program is mentioned by Paul Mutton as:

     “[Having] fairly simple heuristics enable us to obtain reasonably accurate approximates of the data required to produce the social      network”

And this enforces the notion of reliability and credibility. However, all tools have their limitations, and one of PieSpy’s current drawbacks is that Mutton describes the approximations as subjective by nature and that there are a few occurrences when the social network— derived from the heuristics— can be taken as no more than a guess.

     Another potential drawback is the technical difficulties that the program currently undergoes. Paul Mutton mentions the program’s color and capacity as other variables used in the implementation of PieSpy, which add further redundant emphasis, which sometimes causes a distortion within the displayed layout image. Although this piece of knowledge may seem bothersome, Paul Mutton also makes a point to provide that casual testing have shown participants to be content with the results, often concurring with what they interpret from the diagram as a parallel to what they initially had suspected. Paul Mutton also notes that it has been an extremely rare case for any user to disagree with elements within the diagrams, and however subjective it ultimately may be, PieSpy has proven itself to become useful in satisfyingly fulfilling the purpose of individuals who put this tool to practice.

4. RESOURCES FOR FURTHER STUDY:

Gelhausen, Andreas. Summary of IRC Networks. (Accessed Feb 14 2009)

www.irc.netsplit.de/networks/

Krebs, Valdis. Introduction to Social Network Analysis. (Accessed Feb 17 2009)

www.orgnet.com/sna.html

Mutton, Paul. “PieSpy Social Network Bot”. 2001. PieSpy. (Accessed Feb 17 2009)

www.jibble.org/piespy

Quigley, Aaron. Eades, Peter. FADE: Graph Drawing, Clustering and Visual Abstraction. GD 2000, LNCS 1984, pages 197-210, 2001.

Wellman, Barry. “An Electronic Group is Virtually a Social Network”. Culture of the Internet, pp. 179-205, 1997.