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Ranker Uses Big Data to Rank the 25 Best Film Schools in the World

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posted May 24, 2013, 15:25

Does USC or NYU have a better film school? “Big data” can provide an answer to this question by linking data about movies and the actors, directors, and producers who have worked on specific movies, to data about universities and the graduates of those universities. As such, one can use semantic data from sources like Freebase, DBPedia, and IMDB to figure out which schools have produced the most working graduates. However, what if you cared about the quality of the movies they worked on rather than just the quantity? Educating a student who went on to work on The Godfather must certainly be worth more than producing a student who received a credit on Gigli.

Leveraging opinion data from Ranker’s Best Movies of All-Time list in addition to widely available semantic data, Ranker recently produced a ranked list of the world’s 25 best film schools, based on credits on movies within the top 500 movies of all-time. USC produces the most film credits by graduates overall, but when film quality is taken into account, NYU (208 credits) actually produces more credits among the top 500 movies of all-time, compared to USC (186 credits). UCLA, Yale, Julliard, Columbia, and Harvard take places 3 through 7 on the Ranker’s list. Several professional schools that focus on the arts also place in the top 25 (e.g. London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) as well as some well-located high schools (New York’s Fiorello H. Laguardia High School & Beverly Hills High School).

The World’s Top 25 Film Schools
1.    New York University (208 credits)
2.    University of Southern California (186 credits)
3.    University of California – Los Angeles (165 credits)
4.    Yale University (110 credits)
5.    Julliard School (106 credits)
6.    Columbia University (100 credits)
7.    Harvard University (90 credits)
8.    Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (86 credits)
9.    Fiorello H. Laguardia High School of Music & Art (64 credits)
10.    American Academy of Dramatic Arts (51 credits)
11.    London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (51 credits)
12.    Stanford University (50 credits)
13.    HB Studio (49 credits)
14.    Northwestern University (47 credits)
15.    The Actors Studio (44 credits)
16.    Brown University (43 credits)
17.    University of Texas – Austin (40 credits)
18.    Central School of Speech and Drama (39 credits)
19.    Cornell University (39 credits)
20.    Guildhall School of Music and Drama (38 credits)
21.    University of California – Berkeley (38 credits)
22.    California Institute of the Arts (38 credits)
23.    University of Michigan (37 credits)
24.    Beverly Hills High School (36 credits)
25.    Boston University (35 credits)

"Clearly, there is a huge effect of geography, as prominent New York and Los Angeles based high schools appear to produce more graduates who work on quality films compared to many colleges and universities,“ says Ravi Iyer, Ranker's Principal Data Scientist, a graduate of the University of Southern California.

Ranker is able to combine factual semantic data with an opinion layer because Ranker is powered by a Virtuoso triple store with over 700 million triples of information that are processed into an entertaining list format for users on Ranker’s consumer facing website, Ranker.com. Each month, over 7 million unique users interact with this data - ranking, listing and voting on various objects - effectively adding a layer of opinion data on top of the factual data from Ranker's triple store. The result is a continually growing opinion graph that connects factual and opinion data. As of January 2013, Ranker’s opinion graph included over 30,000 nodes with over 5 million edges connecting these nodes.

Resources:

http://www.ranker.com/