Maps, Distant Reading and the Internet Movie Database

Abstract

The presence of large-scale data sets, made available thanks to information technology, fostered in the past few years a new scholarly interest for the use of computational methods to extract, visualize and observe data in the Humanities. Scholars from various disciplines work on new models of analysis to detect and understand major patterns in cultural production, circulation and reception, following the lead, among others, of Lev Manovich’s cultural analytics. The aim is to use existing raw information in order to develop new questions and offer more answers about today’s digital landscape. Starting from these premises, and witnessing the current digitisation of television production, distribution, and reception, in this paper we ask what digital approaches based on big data can bring to the study of television series and their movements in the global mediascape.

Queer and Mainstream: Tracing Heartstopper’s Reception of Via Digital Tools

“…Our observations are dependant on the tools we use, too. Most of the time, a quantitative web analysis / web ethnography relies much more on the shape of the platform than on a real phenomenon (Taurino and Boni 2018).…”