Treating cultural works as nodes and influences as directed edges, the visualization of these cultural networks can provide new insights into the rich interconnections of cultural development. The graphics represent complex relationships of movie references by combining macro views summarizing 100 years of movie influences with micro views providing a close-up look at the embedding of individual movies. The macro view shows the rise of the self-referential character of postmodern cinema, while the micro level illustrates differences between individual movies, when they were referenced and by whom. The visualizations provide views that are closer to the real complexity of the relationships than aggregated views or rankings could do.

Cultural development in movie history

The visualizations are based on data from IMDB (The Internet Movie database) which is an Online movie community with 42 million users. IMDB collects all kinds of information about movies, one part is a collection of references between movies. In the database these references are stored under the menu point »connections«. There are nine different reference types (alternate language version of, edited from, features, follows, references, remake of, spin off from, spoofs & version of ). For the visualization we focused on the category »reference«. The dataset contains 119,135 such connections from 42,571 movies. To be able to responsively visualize the data in a web browser we selected the 3,000 most connected movies by in-degree and their 10,000 connections to each other.

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