Sorting DVDs

08 Nov 2011 So there are plenty of ways to arrange your DVDs, if indeed you chose to arrange them at all. The most popular one would probably be alphabetically. Alternatives may include arranging by release date, by director, actor, genre..

At one point there was some logic to the arrangement of my own DVD. But as I got more DVDs and less space, it mostly devolved into piles, arranged roughly based on the order they were bought in, and which were watched most recently.

If I ever get time, I will re-sort them.


I accept that alphabetical may be considered 'best'. In particular, if you have a significantly large collection, it can be the most efficient approach, and makes locating any given film much easier.

Now, ordering things alphabetically is usually considered quintessentially 'OCD'/fastidious behaviour. Though there is dispute over whether liking your DVDs (and things in general) to be in order really is, or should be, considered 'abnormal'.

My point is, I could do much worse.


First of all, I think, in general, films by the same director should be kept together; particularly when it's a notable director, say, Tarantino, Kubrick, Burton.. So you could group and sort groups alphabetically by director.

I would say that films of similar genre/theme/styles should be kept close as well - noting that films by a given director will generally stay close together when this criterion is applied.

And while you're at it, why not take into consideration: actors, writers, based on works by, producers, scored by.. Basically, there are a lot of potential connections which may be considered.


So I'd like to put forward two approaches:-



1) Salesman Sort

For this approach we take into consideration 'most meaningful connections' between films, and based on that, attempt to determine which films most belong together.

So, for a given set of films, we build a network graph where pairs of films are connected if they share a common director, actors, theme, etc.

Doing this for Tim Burton films, based on actors only, will give something like this
[NB/ There may be connections missing.]

Or like this without the actor nodes
The connections between films are then weighted based on how 'meaningful' they are.

For example, Moon and American Beauty both star Kevin Spacey. Fight Club and Choke, on the other hand, have no actors in common, but were both based on books by Chuck Palahniuk. I would argue that the connection in the latter case is more meaningful - and so should get a higher weighting - than that of the former.


Now, the trick is to find a way of translating this graph into an arrangement of films. It turns out, this is as 'simple' as running a Traveling Salesman algorithm on the graph.

The traveling salesman works like this - find a path around a graph which visits every node exactly once, while minimising the distance traveled.

In our case, we actually want to find a path which (effectively) maximises 'distance', since that will lead to the more significant connections being chosen by preference.

In the above graph, the connections haven't been weighted, so we can pick any path - for example
But ideally, the connections would be weighted first so that the path (and by extension, arrangement) chosen is more meaningful.

Once a path is found, this is turned into an arrangement by simply looking at the order in which the nodes (films) are visited.


The biggest problem with this approach is forming the graph in the first place. One possible solution is to write a program which can pull details from, say, imdb to build connection. Then you'd also need to come up with some system for weighting - which may vary from person to person, depending on their particular preferences.. So it's tricky.

By comparison, the Traveling Salesman part is relatively straight forward, given that it already has well establish (if potentially slow) algorithms for solution.

This approach can also throw up some eccentricities. For example, films by a common director may be split up by a film which has few other connection elsewhere in the graph. This is why I would advise 'fine tuning' by hand.

Similarly, it's possible that the addition of new DVDs to the collection may lead to a major re-shuffle being required. Obviously, how major or minor the re-arrangement depends on how well the film fits in with your pre-existing collection.



2) Hierarchical Grouping and Associative Sorting

This is actually the approach I started out with, before it went to shit.

You might start by grouping by director. Then you might group directors by genre/theme/style. And within the bigger director groups, you might sub-group by actor. And so on..

In particular, the 'hierarchy' is constructed so that some groupings get priority over others. For example, films with the same actor might be split up when those by the same director need to be kept together. (This will depend on how you chose to structure your hierarchy).

Then, within and amongst, DVDs and groups can be arranged according to alphabet, release date, genre, .., even by colour of cover. This is where the 'associative' part comes in. Ultimately, it can come down to how your own demented logic associates and puts things together.

When I was sorting mine, I did end up with some fairly esoteric, and sometimes laboured groupings and connections in places. But you can see some overall logic in it - e.g.

Nightmare Before Christmas / ... / Sweeney Todd / From Hell / ... / V for Vendetta / ... / X-Men..

In this case - Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, Alan Moore, Graphic Novels, and so on. Note that there is overlapping between adjacent groups. They were then sub-sorted so as to be grouped by theme, and so that they formed a natural thematic progression from one group to the next (as much as possible).



Or if you prefer, you could just arrange them alphabetically. Your call..



Oatzy.


[To be honest, I wouldn't recommend either.]