Tracking Mass Ideology through IMDb's Top 250
Department
History and Political Science
Major
History
Research Advisor
Tohline, Andrew Max
Advisor's Department
Arts, Languages, and Philosophy
Funding Source
First Year Research Experience Program
Abstract
In 1947, film scholar Siegfried Kracauer famously argued in his book "From Caligari to Hitler" that the films of Weimar Germany provided clues as to the “inner life” of a culture undergoing seismic ideological changes. Now in 2019, an era of mass data collection, there is a more concrete way to quantify the relationship between a culture’s art and beliefs beyond looking at films being released.
The IMDb Top 250 movies, a list compiled with ratings collected from users, tracks attitudes towards the movies even after their release. For this project, we collected snapshots of Top 250 lists preserved on the Wayback Machine to examine changes in users’ opinions between 2004 and 2019. Most films’ rankings rose or fell according to identifiable patterns. However, films that behave atypically may indicate underlying ideological shifts, and preliminary data analysis suggests trends relating to fantasy and wish fulfillment.
Biography
Mackenzie Shields is a freshman pursing a Bachelor of Arts in History and a Bachelor of Science in Technical Communication. She intends to attend graduate school and aspires to work in museum archiving and curation. Mackenzie serves as the Traditions Committee Chair of the Thomas Jefferson Hall Association, Member-At-Large of the Residence Hall Association, and Secretary of History Club.
Research Category
Arts and Humanities
Presentation Type
Poster Presentation
Document Type
Poster
Award
Arts and humanities poster session: Second place
Location
Upper Atrium
Presentation Date
16 Apr 2019, 9:00 am - 3:00 pm
Tracking Mass Ideology through IMDb's Top 250
Upper Atrium
In 1947, film scholar Siegfried Kracauer famously argued in his book "From Caligari to Hitler" that the films of Weimar Germany provided clues as to the “inner life” of a culture undergoing seismic ideological changes. Now in 2019, an era of mass data collection, there is a more concrete way to quantify the relationship between a culture’s art and beliefs beyond looking at films being released.
The IMDb Top 250 movies, a list compiled with ratings collected from users, tracks attitudes towards the movies even after their release. For this project, we collected snapshots of Top 250 lists preserved on the Wayback Machine to examine changes in users’ opinions between 2004 and 2019. Most films’ rankings rose or fell according to identifiable patterns. However, films that behave atypically may indicate underlying ideological shifts, and preliminary data analysis suggests trends relating to fantasy and wish fulfillment.
