Measuring diversity in Hollywood through the large-scale computational analysis of film.

ABSTRACT: Movies are a massively popular and influential form of media, but their computational study at scale has largely been off-limits to researchers in the United States due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In this work, we illustrate use of a new regulatory framework to enable computational research on film that permits circumvention of technological protection measures on digital video discs (DVDs). We use this exemption to legally digitize a collection of 2,307 films representing the top 50 movies by U.S. box office over the period 1980 to 2022, along with award nominees. We design a computational pipeline for measuring the representation of gender and race/ethnicity in film, drawing on computer vision models for recognizing actors and human perceptions of gender and race/ethnicity.

SUBMITTER: Bamman D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11573682 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature