MovieNetR

MovieNetR is an interactive movie-recommendation network built from r/MovieSuggestions discussions and IMDb title data. The Python pipeline extracts movie entities, normalizes title names, and connects films that occur in the same recommendation threads.

The resulting network is displayed as a WebGL graph using Graphology and Sigma.js. Node positions are loaded from the included GEXF graph rather than being calculated in the browser.

Run the graph explorer

The frontend is static and loads its JavaScript dependencies from esm.sh. Start a local HTTP server from the repository root:

python -m http.server 8000

Open http://localhost:8000. Opening index.html directly will not work because the frontend uses JavaScript modules and fetches the graph as a separate file.

The explorer loads network/movie_graph.gexf and provides controls to:

• Zoom in and out.
• Reset the camera.
• Show or hide all graph edges.
• Change the node-label rendering threshold.
• Pan and zoom around the network using the mouse.

The GEXF file is approximately 34 MB, so its initial download and parsing can take a moment.

Data pipeline

Python dependencies are listed in requirements.txt. The pipeline stages are located in pipeline/:

1. 01_store_submissions.py imports Reddit submissions into SQLite.
2. 02_store_comments.py imports Reddit comments.
3. 03_get_anchors.py extracts anchor movies from submission titles.
4. 04_get_suggestions.py extracts suggested movies from qualifying comments.
5. 05_clean_movie_titles.py matches extracted names against IMDb titles.
6. 06_build_graph.py builds and exports the movie network.
7. 07_get_ego.py creates a focused ego-network visualization for one movie.

Run pipeline modules from the repository root so local packages resolve correctly. For example:

python -m pipeline.01_store_submissions

The raw Reddit and IMDb inputs belong in input/, while SQLite databases are written under db/. Both directories are intentionally excluded from Git because they contain large local datasets.

Main files

• index.html contains the graph viewer interface.
• main.js loads the GEXF network and configures Sigma.js.
• network/movie_graph.gexf is the graph currently shown by the frontend.
• network/ contains other generated or preserved graph artifacts.
• core/, models/, and pipeline/ contain the Python data-processing code.