Oscars

Data is so hot right now

Infographics are hot right now - it sees like everyone is getting in on them. And why not? They're fun. These days though, I'm more interested in the data behind the infographics. Maybe it is just because I've been heads-down doing a ton of online research to inform creative ideas for clients, or maybe its just because I like data. I especially like the large data sets that are made easily accessible thanks to social media.

Here are a couple of my favorite pieces of data mining (and I think all of them could make for great infographics):

TorrentFreak predicts Inception will clean up at the Oscars

Per their blog post: "After crunching the numbers, taken from thousands of publicly available torrents, this awards race turned out to be an easy win for Inception. With a staggering 13,780,000 downloads Christopher Nolan’s movie was the clear winner." Note: based on previous years, these torrent-based predictions don't necessarily hold true.

Stumbling During the Super Bowl

StumbleUpon is easily my favourite social media site/tool/distraction, and it was really cool to see the way they analyzed the way people were using the site over the course of the Super Bowl.

Music Download Analysis Reveals Mood of Bahrain

I loved this post that BoingBoing made over the weekend about judging the national mood of countries based on the music that was being downloaded. How has this changed over time? What would it look like compared the current economy?

Comment Profanity By Lanuage

In this little study, someone compared the amount of swear words included in different types of computer code.

Have you seen any other cool bits of data mining and analysis like this?

-Parker

Oscar Predictions via Facebook Likes

After thinking about the post I wrote earlier today about data mining, I thought it would be interesting to see if  I could predict this year's Oscar winner for Best Picture based on the number of Facebook Fans the movie has or the number of people listing that movie in their interests. The results were actually a lot less interesting than I thought they'd be, and it looks like Inception is the clear fan-favorite based on what Canadians have indicated that they are interested in on Facebook (information via Facebook's self-serve advertising tool):

Black Swan - 19,580

The Fighter - 19,960 (though this was for "Fighter")

Inception - 128,200

The Kids Are All Right - 0

The King's Speech - 0

127 Hours - 3,600

The Social Network - 0

Toy Story 3 - 280

True Grit - 3,700

Winter's Bone - 0

However, if we look at the number of fans each movie has on their Facebook page, we get slightly different results:

Black Swan - 468,079 (Interestingly enough, this is a generic Facebook Fan Page)

The Fighter - 76,844

Inception - 5,591,684

The Kids Are All Right - 42,018

The King's Speech - 48,617

127 Hours - 136,414

The Social Network - 221,395

Toy Story 3 - 600,00+ (Disney appears to have set up separate fan pages for each region/language)

True Grit - 21, 254

Winter's Bone - 22,211 (What the hell is this movie, anyways? I've never heard of it).

In both lists, it looks like Inception is the clear favorite. However, it also looks like the producers of Inception spent the most time and money on their Facebook Page.

I'd love to go back over the past 5 (or ten or fifteen!) years of Oscar winners and nominees and compare them to the number of Facebook Fans. It would be interesting to see if there is one category where Canadians (or perhaps another country) predicted the winner every year.

-Parker