Maps, Distant Reading and the Internet Movie Database: New Approaches for the Analysis of Large-Scale Datasets in Television Studies

The presence of large-scale data sets, made available thanks to information technology, fostered in the past few years a new scholarly interest for the use of computational methods to extract, visualize and observe data in the Humanities. Scholars from various disciplines work on new models of analysis to detect and understand major patterns in cultural production, circulation and reception, following the lead, among others, of Lev Manovich’s cultural analytics. The aim is to use existing raw information in order to develop new questions and offer more answers about today’s digital landscape. Starting from these premises, and witnessing the current digitisation of television production, distribution, and reception, in this paper we ask what digital approaches based on big data can bring to the study of television series and their movements in the global mediascape.