An Analysis of Actors in Malay Films: Small Worlds, Centralities and Genre Diversity

Abstract

This article utilizes social network analysis in addition to a measure of genre diversity to quantify the quality and capacity of actors in the Malay language film industry. We built a dataset by collecting data from various websites pertaining to Malay films. The data consists of 180 Malay films released from 2015 until 2020. The actor network is then built by connecting actors co-starring in a movie together and is compared to small world networks. We quantified the quality of actors in the network using five measures: number of films (TFA), degree centrality (DC), strength centrality (SC), betweenness centrality (BC), and normalized Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (NHHI). TFA, DC and SC indicate experience in the industry, since a high TFA shows that an actor has acted in more films. A high DC shows an actor has worked with many co-stars, and a high SC reflects an actor’s frequency of co-occurrence relationship. Actors with high TFA, DC, and SC are popular in this sense. Meanwhile, BC highlights the social importance of an actor in the network where they are the middlemen that connect actors from different genres of movies in the network, and we found that high BC actors are voice actors that may not have a high TFA, DC, or SC. NHHI highlights the actor’s capability to work with different types of film, and it serves as an important measure of an actor’s versatility. Moreover, we also calculated the average shortest path in the network to search for the “Kevin Bacon” of the Malay language film actor network. Using NHHI as an indicator of genre diversity, we also show that most of the actors diversify their work over the years and that genre diversity is an important benchmark for an actor.