The generation of novelty is central to any creative endeavor. Noveltygeneration and the relationship between novelty and individual hedonic valuehave long been subjects of study in social psychology. However, few studieshave utilized large-scale datasets to quantitatively investigate these issues.Here we consider the domain of American cinema and explore these questionsusing a database of films spanning a 70 year period. We use crowdsourcedkeywords from the Internet Movie Database as a window into the contents offilms, and prescribe novelty scores for each film based on occurrenceprobabilities of individual keywords and keyword-pairs. These scores providerevealing insights into the dynamics of novelty in cinema. We investigate hownovelty influences the revenue generated by a film, and find a relationshipthat resembles the Wundt-Berlyne curve. We also study the statistics of keywordoccurrence and the aggregate distribution of keywords over a 100 year period.
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