Aliases of actors
After adding a new drawing, the actor analysis always looks a bit strange due do duplicated entries. On close review, it shows that there are actors with nearly the same name. This is simply because Mark Lombardi did not use the same description for nodes across all drawings. There are two kinds of situations where an actor appears in two drawings:
- One drawing is a subsequent version of the other. The variants from different versions are usually easy to detect since they are quite close.
- The actor connects two narrations in two different drawings. Sometimes, this is easy to spot, sometimes it remains unclear whether Lombardi actually meant the same actor.
I spend some time after adding a drawing with correcting and extending the list of aliases (which is here as a Perl data structure). Depending on the size of the new drawing, the number of actors is reduced by this by up to 5 percent. I find the following cases:
- My digitization was wrong, I simply did not read Lombardis handwriting correctly. So the other drawings serve as a source for corrections. These seem to account for about half of the corrections necessary.
- Lombardi was not sure and did use different spellings for the same node. I found a node in the Gerry Bull pieces which is labeled “Global Reedesay – Hamburg” in the 4th version and “Global Reedesay – Hamburg” in the 5th. Both is wrong since it is “Globus-Reederei” with “Reederei” being German for “shipping company“. There is a german language article from 1981, which describes part of the drawing, including that Globus-Reederei: “Nachricht von Marais”, DER SPIEGEL 43/1981.
- There are technical issues and inconsistencies with the encoding of special characters in the labels that lead to strange effects.