Key passage: "When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous. Whereas the way these things are taught normally in college and school is a sampler of what this one wrote and that one wrote and you’re asked to be more interested in the date of the publication of Keat’s sonnets than in what’s in them.”
I think many of us have deployed this graph in our own lives. I watch movies this way - watch more movies made by a director I like. Then watch movies by the people this director likes. Its a wonderful exploration.
I wish there was a version of IMDB that allowed this meta exploration of movies - i.e. exploring the influence-graph for movies (or any art as a matter of fact).
There is a wonderful documentary called Connections [1] that explores this in the world of science, technology and engineering -- it traces the sequence of inventions and inventors that had influenced each other. I strongly recommend viewing it. You may find it very inspiring!