I came across a list of famous film reviewers Siskel & Ebert’s Top Ten lists over 30 years and wondered: What films did they agree on? Did their tastes converge? How did their choices align with the Academy Awards?

A perfect job for NodeBox! So, just for fun this weekend, I whipped up this chart (network, screenshot, csv, and pdf attached).

The network features a handy little subnetwork I made called “diff”. Feed it two lists, a common field to compare (in this case “film”), and a mode (0, 1, or 2). 0 returns everything in list A not in list B. 1 returns everything in list B not in list A. 2 (the default) returns everything in common to both (using rows from list A). The whole thing is done using only 14 nodes and runs quickly.

There’s a lot of information packed into this chart. Outside of NodeBox you’ll need a good PDF viewer to zoom into the film titles inside the little dots. After some experimentation I doubled the size to accommodate Chrome (which can only zoom 500%).