This interactive map offers a wide view of all the TV series that mention the NSA, the American National Security Angency. The bubble chart enables us to see quickly the TV shows in which the Security Agency is an important actor and those that name it only one time. The analysis also shows that in some TV series the NSA appears in many episodes and not so frequently, by contrast in others it appears in few episodes and many times.
The bubble chart presents the importance of each series in the setting of our analysis. Each TV series is defined by the number of episodes which name "NSA" and the number of sentences with "NSA" inside. The size represents the number of episodes while the color represents the number of sentences. For example, the TV show NCIS is represented by a big bubble but it is colored in blue, therefore the NSA is named in many episodes but not so frequently. On the other hand the bubble of Jake 2.0 is small but colored in red, so "NSA" is named in few episodes but very frequently, maybe because there are some episodes of the series mainly centered on this topic. The bubbles are sorted according to the number of episodes: in the centre of the chart there are the TV series in which the Security Agency is a main actor.
Our corpus is built from the website Subzin which is a database containing all the subtitles of a large basin of both films and TV series. To keep close to the mass surveillance dimension, three queries were initially used: "NSA", "surveillance" and "privacy". These queries are serched in all the subtitles of the TV series of the database. However the latest two provided results that were too wide, both in terms of quantity and quality, so they are eliminated. Moreover it is necessary to specify that: if "surveillance" and "privacy" take care of a quite wide scenery, the "NSA" delimits this scenery with precision and in a univocal way. Through the employment of Kimono for Google Chrome, it is possible to turn the list of episodes realised by Subzin into a structured dataset, which is made of: -the title of all the series that mention the NSA; -the title of the episodes; -the sentence containing the word "NSA".
At this point the episodes and the sentences with the word "NSA" for every TV shows are counted, that is each TV show owns two numbers: the first one is the number of its own episodes that mention the Security Agency, the second one is the number of times that the NSA is named.
Looking at the bubble chart one will immediately notice that there is a bigger bubble at the centre, that is 24, a serial drama which stars Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, focusing on the efforts of the fictional Counter Terrorist Unit, and on their efforts to protect USA from the terrorism plots. This Terrorist Unit collaborates both in the second and the eighth season with the NSA.
Generally speaking there are two different groups, one colored in blue-shades, located at the border of this cloud, and the other one in red-shades, at the centre. The first one is bigger and contains all the series in whitch NSA is mentioned less than 30 times. On the other hand the red group show the significant basin of the TV series in our analysis. The light blue bubbles are not so important and probably the NSA isn't a key subject of these TV series. The anchor group between the red bubbles and the blue ones is violet and it is heterogeneous since there are series that mention NSA in more than 25 episodes, like the famous drama NCIS, and others that mention the Agency only in 6 episodes, like The Good Wife.
