Crowdsourced databases allow quantifying intertextuality in music and film.

Evidence

In the spirit of this nonrepresentational, interpretation-based model of humanistic data formation, I have undertaken a series of database-informed analyses of derivative media. Influenced by the concepts of “distant reading” and “cultural analytics,” I aim to investigate questions of intertextuality and economy on a scale that would not be possible without computation. Software is used to digitally catalog and visualize cultural data, harvested from online databases such as Genius (a website that catalogs and offers quantitative access to popular music lyrics, primarily hip hop) and IMDb (the Internet Movie Database, which contains various types of data for most television shows and films). — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 326

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the methodology of database-driven ‘distant reading’ of intertexts drawing on Genius and IMDb — a concrete, reusable method definition.