Measuring Long-Term Impact Based on Network Centrality: Unraveling Cinematic Citations

Abstract

Traditional measures of success for film, such as box-office revenue and critical acclaim, lack the ability to quantify long-lasting impact and depend on factors that are largely external to the craft itself. With the growing number of films that are being created and large-scale data becoming available through crowd-sourced online platforms, an endogenous measure of success that is not reliant on manual appraisal is of increasing importance. In this article we propose such a ranking method based on a combination of centrality indices. We apply the method to a network that contains several types of citations between more than 40,000 international feature films. From this network we derive a list of milestone films, which can be considered to constitute the foundations of cinema. In a comparison to various existing lists of ‘greatest’ films, such as personal favourite lists, voting lists, lists of individual experts, and lists deduced from expert polls, the selection of milestone films is more diverse in terms of genres, actors, and main creators. Our results shed light on the potential of a systematic quantitative investigation based on cinematic influences in identifying the most inspiring creations in world cinema. In a broader perspective, we introduce a novel research question to large-scale citation analysis, one of the most intriguing topics that have been at the forefront of scientific enquiries for the past fifty years and have led to the development of various network analytic methods. In doing so, we transfer widely studied approaches from citation analysis to the the newly emerging field of quantification efforts in the arts. The specific contribution of this paper consists in modelling the multidimensional cinematic references as a growing multiplex network and in developing a methodology for the identification of central films in this network.

Identification of milestone papers through time-balanced network centrality

“…Our work constitutes a particular instance of a general methodology -the comparison of the outcomes of quantitative variables with a ground-truth established by experts -which can be applied for metric evaluation in several kinds of systems, such as movies [22,44] or the network of scientific authors [31]. In the domain of research evaluation, this methodology is particularly relevant since bibliometric indices are increasingly used in practice -often uncritically and in questionable ways [16,68] -and scholars from diverse field have produced a plethora of possible impact metrics [12], especially those aimed at assessing researchers' productivity and impact.…”

Ranking in evolving complex networks

“…The very recent paper on the first empirical observation of gravitational waves, for example, reaches a particularly high rescaled PageRank value of 28.6 which is only matched by a handful of papers. 15 Despite being very recent, the paper is ranked 17 out of 593,443 papers, as compared to its low rankings by the citation count (rank 1,763) and PageRank (rank 12,277). Among the recent papers that score well by R(p) are recent seminal contributions to the study of graphene (The electronic properties of graphene from 2009) and topological insulators (two papers from 2010 and 2011); both these topics have recently received Nobel Prize in physics.…”

Waves of novelties in the expansion into the adjacent possible

“…The study of innovation processes has been extensively tackled by the scientific community [ 4 – 10 ], with a focus, in relatively recent times, to the study of the dynamics of popularity. Many efforts have been devoted to the introduction of suitable metrics to predict the future popularity of the elements of various systems from early conditions [ 11 – 17 ] or to identify the features of innovative or creative elements [ 18 , 19 ]. From the modelling perspective, the attention has been focused in the prediction of the future importance of an element by fitting the early stages of its dynamics [ 20 – 22 ] or in the characterization of the microscopic dynamical patterns of single elements [ 23 – 26 ].…”