Journey to the True Tales of the IMDB!

| Gabriel |

Following up on yesterday’s post, check out this paper by Herr and his colleagues that graphs IMDB and provides some basic descriptions of the network. You can also see a zoomable version of their truly gorgeous visualization. Finally the answer to that age old question, what do you get for the quantitative cultural sociologist who has everything?

The authors are affiliated with the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana. Although Indiana sociology has a well-deserved reputation for hardcore quant research, CNS is at the school of Information. Following the logic I learned from reading Marvel comics as a kid I can only speculate that something about the pesticide run-off in the drinking water gives scholars at Indiana superhuman abilities to code.

Also of note is that CNS provides the cross-platform open source package Network Workbench. I was a little skeptical because it’s written in Java (which tends to be slow) but I got it to create a PageRank vector of a huge dataset in six minutes, which isn’t bad at all. I may have more to say about this program in the future as I plan to tinker with it.