CMPE 58B Project Report
Extracting network of critics based on their selection and evaluation of products
Işık Barış Fidaner
Introduction Metacritic is a website where movie, game, music, book and TV reviews are aggregated. Most of these reviews are online and available in the websites of newspapers and magazines, but Metacritic collects them in a more uniform and structured way. This site is referred by many professionals as a metric to determine a product’s quality. In addition to collecting and summarizing verbal content, Metacritic also calculates the mean of several ratings given by different sources to the same product, namely, the Metascore. This meta-rating is considered to be so informative that it is even used by producers to choose whether to work with a studio or an artist or not. In this project, I extracted the similarity relations among the critics (newspapers, magazines) based on which products they chose to review, and how they evaluated them. Then, the relations among all the critics in a specific domain (TV, music or cinema) were used to extract a hierarchical classification of publications in that domain. In this way, we get a picture that clearly shows the overall similarity groups of publications.
Intention If a critic reviewed a product and has given a high score to it, we can assume that there is a social connection between the audience of that publication and the audience of that movie/album etc. Thus, if we can extract similarities and differences between these publications, this information might yield clues for understanding the cultural network of the audience of these products. For example, if we can extract clusters among the publications that correspond to mainstream, alternative or other types of products (and their respective audience), we can consider this regularity as the reflection of a deeper structure which is the cultural network