July 8, 2013

A History of Film in Wikipedia

What story does the link structure of Wikipedia tell about the history of film? My timeline represents the most important movies of the last 100 years – generated via a link analysis algorithm on Wikipedia. The blue bars correspond to influence labelled with the most important movie of that year.

How?

In a nutshell, “influence” represents the chance that an infinitely bored web surfer will be browsing the page after surfing for an long period of time. For technical folks, this is the PageRank calculated from intra-Wikipedia links. See my post on ranking universities using Wikipedia for more details.

Using movie infoboxes from Wikipedia, I’ve identified the release year for all movies. The influence of the highest scoring film for that year gives the shape of the blue bars on the left side of the graph.

The visualization is coded in d3.js and the influence code is my custom WikiRank project (coded in go!). Feel free to fork it.

Pay attention!

A couple of interesting tid-bits from the graph:

Titanic Titan: Titanic is the most influential movie of the few movies released in my lifetime and almost matches Star Wars IV. Remember that the graph represents influence and not quality.
World War II: The early war years were an amazing time in film. Starting with The Wizard of Oz in 1939, there is a marked increase in influence which persists until just after America joins the war. More classics: Citizen Kane, Casablanca and Fantasia!
The early years: There are very few blockbusters pre-1930. There are two notable exceptions: in 1927, Metropolis forms a solitary peak and in 1915 excels with The Birth of a Nation. Drilling deeper, Metropolis actually represents 31% of the film influence mass for 1927.

To crunch the data for yourself, I’ve made a machine-readable list of influence and films available online.

Find something interesting? Visualization ideas? Comment or tweet @cosbynator

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acjohnson55

Awesome!! It would be great to also see just a Top 200 or something, as well!
- tdimson
  
  Thanks! You might be interested in my last post: http://blog.argteam.com/golang/the-top-25-movies-of-all-time-chosen-by-an-algorithm/
  
  Or, if you are really adventurous you could see the raw data: https://s3.amazonaws.com/tdimson-fun/wikirank/pageranked_movies.json
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The_Trike

By “influential” don’t you mean “interconnected” or “cross-referenced”?

I fail to see how any modern movie could be more influential than Star Wars or how Aliens could be left off the list entirely. More people became filmmakers *because* of Star Wars than any other film in the past 40 years. And the echoes of Aliens can be seen in movies, TV series and videogames to this day. (Heck, practically half the FPS released are basically Aliens pastiches, and Halo itself is essentially Aliens on Ringworld.)

Also, the Aliens soundtrack was, at one time, the music used most frequently in film trailers. I think it’s still in the top 3 or 4.

The “Wikipedia is a sausagefest” argument doesn’t really hold water considering Titanic’s high score. Like Star Wars, a major factor in Titanic’s massive success was due to a core of fans seeing the movie multiple times, often 10, 20, 30 times or more. Except for Star Wars it was males and for Titanic is was females.
- tdimson
  
  I looked over the raw data for you: Alien is ranked 49th globally and came out the same year as Apocalypse Now (25th globally). It is really just being masked by another influential film. Good catch, though!
  
  And by “influential” I mean interlinked on Wikipedia. Essentially, a movie will score highly if it is linked to by other high scoring things (e.g. the new york times, or the united states).
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lacompacida

Where is Gone With The Wind in your chart. It supposed to be the third.
- Sir Trey
  
  It’s behind The Wizard of Oz, which is 2nd…both came out in 1939, so Gone with the Wind is unfortunately masked.
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Oren

Why would you write a bunch of code to follow links on Wikipedia, when Wikipedia will tell you how many incoming links a page has:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AWhatLinksHere&limit=1000&hideredirs=1&target=The+Dark+Knight+Rises&namespace=0
- tdimson
  
  PageRank is a little more robust than just counting inbound links – you can think of it as calculating importance based on the importance of each inbound link. Simple counts won’t work as well (nor will hitting the Wikipedia API for > 4 million articles). I had to pull a full dump of wikipedia to crunch the data.
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alboin

could you be kind enough to sort by director ? Murnau score before WWII apparently. coppola later also.