This is a network analysis of the citation network among the sci-fi movies on cyborgs, such that if a particular movie (the citing movie, denoted as “A”) features or refers to an earlier movie (the cited movie, denoted as “B”), a directed link is established, pointed from A towards B (presented as “A B” in our network). The citation information in the present study is obtained from Internet Movie Database (IMDB), a public digital movie data archive.

Exploring our visualization of the movie-movie citation network:

1. We explored the movie citation network’s major communities (note: a community in the network can be understood as a subset of nodes, and the connections between these nodes are denser than connections with the rest of the network (Radicchi et al., 2004)). We used community-detection algorithms (Heymann & Le Grand, 2013) and identified the six largest communities (i.e., containing the largest numbers of movies). We present these six sub-networks on this page. In each network, we highlighted the movie titles with the highest centrality values.

2. The dot sizes mean the nodes’ centralities measures (i.e., the “importance” of the node of the network). The larger the centrality value, the most important the node would be; therefore, in our visualization, they are more prominent. We reported three types of node-level centralities: betweenness (the number of shortest paths that pass through a particular node; which is a measure of the ability of a node to connect different subsets of a network), closeness (a node with a higher closeness centrality means the node is closer to other nodes), and eigenvector (a node with a higher eigenvector centrality means the node is more likely to connected to the node which themselves have many connections).

3. Our analysis shows that sci-fi movies featuring cyborgs (or AI systems and robotics) can be classified into different themes based on their relationships with humans (collaborative or adversarial relationships). We can also find that the critical movies are US-centered; most are blockbusters, creating a homogenous and stereotyped representation.

4. We can also observe several “root” movies that “define” the themes of the fictional representation of cyborgs.

Please click here for methodological notes.

Download the full Gephi graph files (ZIP format) here.