> I think many of us have deployed this graph in our own lives. I watch movies this way - watch more movies made by a director I like. Then watch movies by the people this director likes. Its a wonderful exploration.

I use https://www.metal-archives.com in this manner. The number of dimensions on which you can find connections and similarities makes finding new music a joy. A version of IMDB based upon the ideas in MA is what you seek.

Wow, how have I never seen MA that's awesome and pretty darn accurate.

This resonated really well with me. I know people ask you to try and do the opposite (which I guess won't hurt from time to time), but I also think it's really awarding to do exploration this way. I think it may apply better to arts and culture than it does to science and history.

Not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, but I'm really happy with Taste.io for browsing personal movie recommendations. I think you should give it a try.

My first impression of Taste.io is very positive. Good recommendation! Thanks.

last.fm used to be amazing for making these leaps to new artists based on library overlap.

Spotify acquired them, and the new UI/UX makes it much harder to find musical "neighbors" and see what they're listening to, but I'll still check out what my neighbors are listening to once in a while if I'm looking for something new. I find it to be 10x better than Spotify's discover weekly playlists.

Not sure why nobody has done the same for movies yet - track and rate movies, find your "film neighbors", check stuff out based on what directors they have on heavy rotation.

https://www.last.fm/

I think you could approximate this for movies using a social graph - I had a hobby project when I got back into programming a few years ago which attempted to generate recommendations based on the director's and actors' "creator" social graphs. It worked surprisingly well for such a hack.

Sounds interesting. How would one build it for 'influence'? E.g. I would imagine it to be vast and utterly fascinating to map the influence graph of Tarantino :)

I am no expert, but extracting data related to the word influence from IMDB for Tarantino (or any actor/director) is quite doable. Even by employing rudimentary NLP techniques using NLTK and Freebase/wordnet APIs I can gather all Tarantino related documents in which the word influence(or its many synonyms) have appeared. Then I can look for proper nouns in the vicinity of the word 'influence' which will give me a list of all people who have influenced Tarantino. Doing the next level analysis is hard, finding the degree of influence, building a timeline graph of how Tarantino was influenced over a period of time etc. I find the topic of extracting such graphs quite fascinating. I was thinking of doing the something similar for Prof.Snape in the Harry Potter series.

Yeah I've done this for almost a decade now---read everything by an author I connect with then move on based on that experience---and I can't recommend the habit enough! It was a bit problematic in grad school since I'd spend all my time on one person at the expense of much else I had to read, but long term it was absolutely the better move.

Why is this practice so effective? I think it's partly because when we read we basically let another person directly poke at our mind for a while. And when you have a rich and subtle writer who really gets in there, over time you build up a whole different perspective. And when the writers you obsess over are all connected in some way, you can assume the same "perspective" (the same basic assumptions about what is significant, what is not) and naturally deepen your understanding in one area or another in a fairly unified way.

Inspiration gives amazing internal motivation, so follow your inspiration.

An additional tip is to actually start building a graph to connect the ideas together which you can then use to summarise an authors work or an entire field of study.

that writer might be Tim Urban, for me

Thanks for letting me know about Connections, seems very interesting.

Campbell is the guy who said "follow your bliss."