Crowdsourced databases enable quantitative mapping of intertextuality across cultural texts

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). These crowdsourced databases are some of the most extensive catalogs of the intertexts, references, metatexts, paratexts, and product placements that comprise derivative media. For my purposes, I catalog and visualize this intertextuality to lend a degree of scale to my otherwise historical, theoretical, and interpretative approach. With the assistance of digital tools, I’m able to both dig deep into solitary texts, discovering and quantifying micro-relationships, while also mapping broad, macro-cultural dynamics as a result of this wide-ranging data. Ultimately, the political economy of intertextuality is mapped via the database form and expressed via data visualization. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 326

Categorization

• QUESTION: Methodological question: how reliable are crowdsourced lyric databases like Genius for quantifying product placements and references? Sampling and completeness biases likely distort the ‘scale’ this approach promises.
• XREF: Connects to Moretti’s distant reading and Manovich’s cultural analytics, plus the concept of intertextuality as an economic (not just aesthetic) phenomenon.