Mouly Kumaraswamy » India http://mouly.me UX Designer Sat, 21 Apr 2012 14:16:53 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 Bollywood Actor Network http://mouly.me/2009/01/bollywood-actor-network/ http://mouly.me/2009/01/bollywood-actor-network/#comments Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:00:35 +0000 Mouly http://blog.kmouly.com/?p=28 As a fun project, I’m working on the actors social network in Bollywood; in this network the nodes represent Bollywood actors and actresses, an edge connects actors who starred in a movie together. Hollywood actor networks have been studies for a long time. It would be interesting to compare Bollywood and Hollywood actors network, to find useful insights into Bollywood.

IMDB is obvious choice for getting this data. I was skeptical if it covered foreign film industry. After getting the database, I think it is very comprehensive. IMDB offers unix and windows programs to download and maintain the IMDB files locally. I found them a pain to install; I could not install it on my Ubuntu box. JMDB is a Java based program to import the IMDB files into a MySql database. It was easy to use; although it takes a few hours to import the whole database.

Some numbers from the dataset:

  • Number of Hindi movies: 8,119
  • Number of actors:15,954 (Male:10816, Female: 5138)
  • Number of actors who have acted in more than one movie: 5,365 (Male: 3516, Female: 1849)

The database includes both movies and TV. This may be a problem, since TV has larger cast and has different variables than movies.

2007 Bollywood Actor Movie Network

2007 Bollywood Actor Movie Network

I generated the network for the year 2007. The whole network is too big for my computer. I need to figure out methods to visualize such large networks. The red nodes are movies, green nodes are actors.

I will be working on this network, trying to gain insights. I’m interested in identifying ‘star children’; whom I hypothize get a shortcut into the industry. Also I want to find the cliques or clans in the network. Watch this space.

]]> http://mouly.me/2009/01/bollywood-actor-network/feed/ 1 Indian's Internet language preference http://mouly.me/2008/12/indians-internet-language-preference/ http://mouly.me/2008/12/indians-internet-language-preference/#comments Sat, 06 Dec 2008 16:25:09 +0000 Mouly http://blog.kmouly.com/?p=13 In a recent submit, the CEO of Rediff.com a popular Indian Internet portal said that Indian Internet users don’t want content in their native language. His supporting evidence is Rediff provides email services in 11 languages, but only 1% of users use the non-english version. Indians learn English before completing higher education, he added.

His comments are not surprising. But I don’t think Rediff users’ language preference can’t be extended to all Indian Internet users. I hardly write in Tamil (my mother tongue) and I have never used Rediff’s services in non English languages. But I don’t think Rediff provides the best user experience; their UI and overall design needs lot of improvement. So Rediff users may be not using other languages for other reasons like bad interface.

India has 29 languages that are spoken by more than a million people (2001 Census).  There is definitely a need for providing Internet service in Indian languages to reach a wider user base in the country. Indic Computing is a project to provide computing resources in Indian languages. There are other technology intitatives around Indian Languages.

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