A visualization of the ethnicities of the directors and actors of the 1000 highest rated movies on IMDB (February 2016), in collaboration with Hang Do Thi Duc.

The idea originated from the debate of #OscarsSoWhite on social media. Thus, we made this as a contribution to the discussions about how white people are dominating the movie industry. We are taking a deeper look of how this has evolved throughout the history. We cross-referenced our movies dataset and scraped the internet for each person’s ethnicity from year to year (1920- 2016). Ethnicities were scraped from nndb.com, that still left a gap of ~900 unknown ethnicities – it wasn't perfect. My main role in this project is visualizing the data itself, based on a cleaner datasets that were cleaned and provided by Hang.

Live demo: http://slowfa.de/imdb1000

Visualization Process:

Since the idea is to visualize ethnicity distribution, we decided to use a radius chart with bubbles representing each person. The inspiration came from an old project that I did, Cheap Eats Near School. But instead of spreading the bubbles randomly, we wanted to give more sense to it so we started thinking of ways of the particle placement. Each ring represents Year, it goes from the inner to outer rings from 1920 to 2016.

On our next iteration, each bubble position along the ring cirlce is also arranged according to it's IMDB rank, from highest to lowest rank.

Finally, we implemented filtering feature to enable users to see the distribution of each ethnicity.

This project was also featured in the Kantar Information Is Beautiful Awards 2016 Longlist.