Which magazines have the most knowledgeable film critics? Introducing a metric.

By developing and maintaining Cinetrii I’ve been able to amass a rather unique data set. Rows upon rows of film connections, quotes and URL’s that are waiting to be mined for insights (granted, said rows are subject to a lot of noise). So this morning I decided to look into the reviewers who diligently draw the parallels and make the inferences that my thematic search engine depends on. Are some more knowledgeable than others? I made a metric based on inverse popularity of the films mentioned by the critics. Continue reading “Which magazines have the most knowledgeable film critics? Introducing a metric.”

A network of movie connections mined from 154,000 reviews

Earlier this month I launched Cinetrii which connects movies based on references by critics. The goal was to infer the artistic influences at work for a given movie. Of course, there are multiple biases at play here. I’ve already covered the unequal distribution of available reviews in my original blog post. Furthermore, art is only as interesting as the conversation around it, and not all movies warrant fine-grained reflection. Even for those movies that do, the connections are mostly speculative. Critics are not clairvoyant, they can’t know what directors were inspired by. Cinetrii approximates the perception of movie critics more than anything else. The ranking algorithm of Cinetrii which I am continually developing also tries to skewer away from connections with intersecting production cast and crew.

With this in mind, I’ve gone ahead and batch processed the 200 most popular movies from each of the last six years (2010-2015) into Cinetrii. Those 1200 queries draw from roughly 154,000 collected online movie reviews. From the batch, I’ve sampled the 1000 strongest connections into a node graph Continue reading “A network of movie connections mined from 154,000 reviews”