ActorsWith

ActorsWith is a collaborative, open-data project and reference resource that catalogs professional collaborations among actors across film, television, theater, and digital media. It collects publicly available credits, union rosters, press releases, and credible news sources to map relationships such as co-starring and shared voice roles. The goal is a transparent, queryable network of actor collaborations to support research, journalism, and fan scholarship.

Structure and features: The core is a graph database in which actors are nodes and collaborations are edges. Users can search connections between performers, identify frequent collaborators, examine ensemble casts, and view project timelines. The platform offers visualizations, data exports, and an API for researchers and editors. Data ingestion combines automated matching with community moderation to resolve ambiguities across releases and languages.

History and governance: ActorsWith was started by film historians, data scientists, and open-data advocates. It began with a pilot focused on major markets and expanded through community contributions, volunteer editors, and academic partnerships. The project uses a permissive license that encourages reuse while crediting contributors and data sources. A governance board coordinates data standards and dispute resolution.

Data scope and limitations: The database emphasizes credited roles in public records and may underrepresent independent films, stage performances, non-English releases, or uncredited appearances. Inaccuracies can arise from name variants or misattributed credits, which the community seeks to correct through an established editing process.

Reception and impact: Researchers, journalists, and educators cite ActorsWith as a useful tool for studying collaboration patterns and career trajectories. Critics note that it complements existing databases but should not replace official credit records. See also: IMDb, Wikidata, TMDb.