Just for kicks, Wesley Grubbs and Nick Yahnke of Pitch Interactive decided
to play with data used in the InfoVis data visualization contest of 2007.
The data compromized of over 10,000 records of movies with their respective
actors, directors and Oscars won (if any). They wanted to see what the
relationship was between directors, Oscar winning actors and non-Oscar
winning actors to see if they could find patterns in who actors work with. The authors also looked at genres to see which are most popular with Oscars.Using Processing and the ProXML Library by Christian Riekoff to load the information, the XML data was looped through and parsed. The Oscar winning actors were designated to the middle ring, the directors they had worked with to the center ring and the other actors they have worked with to the outer most ring. Bezir curves were used to draw the relationship between each individual between each circle. These curves allow us to examine the relationships between Oscar winning actors and their peers.
The result is a wheel-like diagram with seemingly chaotic spokes within it. While the names of directors and Oscar-winning actors can be difficult to read, one can clearly see specific patterns in the relationships between individuals. One of the interesting discoveries we found here were the few non-Oscar-winning actors who have worked with multiple Oscar-winning actors multiple times.
