Who's at the Center of the Star Trek Universe?

July 22, 2016

Have you ever sat around thinking “If only I could visualize the relationships between all of the characters in Star Trek across episodes, series, and movies…”? For the average person, perhaps not; but if you’re a Trek fan, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that in some version of the timeline you’ve had this thought once or twice.

Any Star Trek fan knows there is a lot of crossover amongst the various series, with overlapping characters and sometimes slightly overlapping plot arcs. This Star Trek Visualization gives you a chance to see all that for yourself. Any combination of episodes and movies can be selected and visualized with the click of the “Engage” button.

Figure: Visualization showing connections across all Star Trek episodes and movies

This Star Trek visualization shows the interactions between characters in the Star Trek Universe based on the episode(s) or movie(s) you selected. Each circle represents a character, and links represent interactions between characters. The more interactions between two characters, the thicker the link between them; similarly, the more interactions linked to a particular character, the larger the circle representing that character. To inspect the relationships of a particular character, simply double click that character’s node, or select their name from the sidebar.

Figure: The computer's relationships

So, why did I create this visualization, you might ask?

Simple! First, I thought it would be fun, interesting, and would give me a chance to flex and strengthen my D3 muscles. Second, I am hoping people will enjoy playing with and exploring the data as much as I have.

I hope you have fun exploring this Star Trek Viz. I would encourage you all to experiment with this visualization to see what you find! Discover any interesting insights*? Let us know in discussions below or via our contact form!

Shout out to Chrissie’s Transcript Site, from where all of the transcripts were collected and to Aric Withana, the designer of the LCARS SDK powered interface.

*Additionally, if you find any problems or errors, please Let us know! Because the data used to create this visualization was pulled from transcripts, there were varoius things that needed to be corrected (e.g. Noonian Soong and Arik Soong were originally both labeled “SOONG”). There’s a lot of data in there and it’s totally possible that other instances like this were missed. Thanks for the help!

contributors to this post

Mollie
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