I am in the early stages of my dissertation and, as I explore the possible DH methods that might apply to my work, am wondering if there might be a way for the DH community to take advantage of the mountain of data at IMDB. I have heard from some folks that they have been unfriendly to researchers, but thought it might be worth some serious effort to make some (all!) of their data, reviews, etc. available to film and media studies scholars. The possibilities for DH methods are virtually limitless. For my own work, data visualizations, social network analysis of cast and crew, etc. are all intriguing possibilities. Has anyone out there gotten permission from IMDB to use data crawlers for scholarly research? Has anyone tried to do so and been denied?
Big data projects using IMDB?
(3 posts) (2 voices)-
I've looked some at the plain text data files they provide, and was surprised at the amount of stuff one could do with them--they don't include reviews, but they do include most of the other stuff one might want--biographical information, fully standardized lists of cast and crew, etc.. And you can just download all the data straightaway without needing permission, and without having to write a crawler. There are some restraints on redistribution, but nothing that seems like it would be onerous for scholarly research. Social scientists have used it for some of the network stuff, eg here and here.
I don't have any experience with the stuff that you <i>can't</i> get through the textfiles.
Posted 3 years ago Permalink
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