IMDB 1000 – Prototype

2016

Screenshot 2016-02-29 12.43.00 copy

A visualization of the ethnicities of the directors and actors of the 1000 highest rated movies on IMDB (February 2016), in collaboration with Umi Syam. The idea originated from the debate of #OscarsSoWhite on social media. Thus, we made this as a contribution to the discussions about how white people are dominating the movie industry. We are taking a deeper look of how this has evolved throughout the history. We cross-referenced our movies dataset and scraped the internet for each person’s ethnicity from year to year (1920- 2016). Experience it here.

Ethnicities were scraped from nndb.com, that still left a gap of ~900 unknown (the data set is certainly not perfect). I scraped the information with node.js and cleaned up the data in open refine.

Each ring represents a year and each circle represents a person, actor/actress or director from those top rated movies. The circles are order clockwise by movie rating.

On hover a picture of that person appears with information about the movie he or she was involved in.

Screenshot 2016-02-29 12.40.36

We also added a functionality to filter by ethnicity to isolate the numerical representation.

OscarSoWhite

(Gif by Umi Syam)

Unfortunately, we never got around to port this p5.js code to d3 for more stable performance and interactivity, as well as zoom and pan. So for now this remains a prototype.