To get started, please select a filmmaker from the sidebar on the left side of the page.
Number of films
First appearance
Most common roles
In a network, we often want to identify which nodes (in our
case, the nodes are filmmakers) are in positions of relative
importance in the network structure. There are lots of
measures which have been developed to do this, and these are
known as centrality measures.
Each measure is different from each other, both in how it
conceptualises what makes a node's position particularly
important or advantageous and how it tries to measure that
concept mathematically.
Here, we have chosen three of the simplest and most widely
used centrality measures to explore in the data:
degree, eigenvector centrality and
betweenness centrality. Use the help boxes to learn
more about what each one measures.
The film industry can be thought of as a collaboration network where people are connected to the people they have worked with. Here, you can find out how strong the position of each filmmaker is in the network, according to a number of network centrality metrics.
To get started, please select a filmmaker from the sidebar on the left side of the page.
In a network, we can identify the "shortest path" between
two nodes (in our case, the nodes are the filmmakers) by
calculating the minimum number of connections that
you would need to trace to reach one from the other.
In the data, two people who have worked together on the
same film are a distance of 1 from one another - we
can connect the two with only one collaboration tie. Somebody
who you haven't worked with directly, but who has worked with
someone that you have worked with is a distance of 2
from you - you can be connected to them by a chain of two
collaboration ties: the collaboration they have with your
collaborator, and your collaborator's tie to you.
This simple network principle is the basis of the well-known
"Six
Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game, which identifies the
shortest chain of film co-appearances between a given actor
and Kevin Bacon.
To get started, please select a filmmaker from the sidebar on the left side of the page.
This interactive network visualisation allows you to explore
the filmmakers that are in the orbit of the person selected
in the main data explorer sidebar. In the graph, each circle
is a filmmaker, and the lines between them show who has
worked with whom.
Note that in order to reduce the loading time of the app
(the full network has almost ten thousand people!), here we
only show people that are within a distance of 2 from
the filmmaker selected in the data explorer sidebar.