I am no expert, but extracting data related to the word influence from IMDB for Tarantino (or any actor/director) is quite doable. Even by employing rudimentary

I am no expert, but extracting data related to the word influence from IMDB for Tarantino (or any actor/director) is quite doable. Even by employing rudimentary NLP techniques using NLTK and Freebase/wordnet APIs I can gather all Tarantino related documents in which the word influence(or its many synonyms) have appeared. Then I can look for proper nouns in the vicinity of the word 'influence' which will give me a list of all people who have influenced Tarantino. Doing the next level analysis is hard, finding the degree of influence, building a timeline graph of how Tarantino was influenced over a period of time etc. I find the topic of extracting such graphs quite fascinating. I was thinking of doing the something similar for Prof.Snape in the Harry Potter series.