Via Wired, by Brandon Keim
We live in an age of networks, with ever more appreciation for connections: among proteins, people, ecosystems and economies — or just about any system made up of linked units. And as connection-mapping tools become more sophisticated, there’s a need for new ways of interacting with those maps, going beyond description to exploration.
A new iPhone app called * Movies Mobile, developed by the New England Complex Systems Institute, is a preview of such tools. A front end for a network map of IMDB’s top 500 movies, it allows people to explore connections among films as researchers might examine pathways of genes or proteins.
What’s unique isn’t the map itself, but the level of exploration the interface provides, said Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of the institute.
“Say I show you a big network. You can see there are major rings, that in places it’s highly or weakly connected, or clustered. You want to say, ‘What is this cluster?’ This lets you touch one node and see what it is. You can see both the whole and the pieces,” said Bar-Yam.
The network itself is based on analysis of relationships among words and phrases in IMDB user comments. The map reflects connections made by viewers’ tastes and impressions; it could just as easily have been designed to map links between actors and directors, or to map something other than movies.
An earlier test of the program was conducted on anthropological documents produced by the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System in Afghanistan. It could also be done with economic networks, networks of genes, disease spread, social groups. Bar-Yam’s group is best known for studying the structural influences of networks in panicking stock markets and economic collapses.
“These are just the first couple applications,” said Bar-Yam. “There could be many.”
* Movies Mobile is available in free and paid versions. There’s also a YouTube tutorial for using it. Proceeds from sales will support research at the New England Complex Systems Institute.
Image: Screen grabs from the * Movies Mobile app. Left: The network formed by comments on the top 500 IMDB movies. Right: Links between Gone With the Wind and the most closely related movies (* Movies Mobile).
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