Quantitative analysis of the evolution of novelty in cinema through crowdsourced keywords.
The generation of novelty is central to any creative endeavor. Novelty generation and the relationship between novelty and individual hedonic value have long been subjects of study in social psychology. However, few studies have utilized large-scale datasets to quantitatively investigate these issues. Here we consider the domain of American cinema and explore these questions using a database of films spanning a 70 year period. We use crowdsourced keywords from the Internet Movie Database as a window into the contents of films, and prescribe novelty scores for each film based on occurrence probabilities of individual keywords and keyword-pairs. These scores provide revealing insights into the dynamics of novelty in cinema. We investigate how novelty influences the revenue generated by a film, and find a relationship that resembles the Wundt-Berlyne curve. We also study the statistics of keyword occurrence and the aggregate distribution of keywords over a 100 year period.
1] Social and Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, NY, 12180, USA [2] Department of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, NY, 12180, USA [3] Department of Physics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, NY, 12180, USA.
Sameet
S
Sreenivasan
D003405:Creativity; D063045:Crowdsourcing; D005106:Exploratory Behavior; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D007802:Language; D011336:Probability; D011998:Recreation / Q000191:economics; D013997:Time Factors