Cindy Conaway, an associate professor in Media Studies and Communication and Diane Shichtman an associate professor in Information Systems at SUNY Empire State College will discuss using the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and its advantages and challenges as a dataset for Digital Humanities. In many ways IMDb is an excellent source for Digital Humanities projects and gives media studies scholars a new way to use Digital Humanities. The organization makes it free to download a great deal of its very robust data. However much of IMDb’s data is inconsistent, incomplete, and often wrong or misleading. The downloadable information is also limited to certain categories. This presentation will also discuss the challenges of interdisciplinary work, and how changes in IMDb’s process over several years, and differing views available to scholars can also create issues as we have found in our project tracing connections using the show Seinfeld.

Requirements: none.