Modern Times:
Rise of Technology in Cinema

Link post for Modern Times: Rise of Technology in Cinema.
Project Github link: ada-2023-project-adacalypse.

Project overview

For the fall 2023 edition of CS-401 Applied Data Analysis at EPFL, we were tasked with creating a data story out of the CMU Movie Summary Corpus. My team and I ran a data-driven investigation of the ties between technology and movies from the standpoints of production tools, public opinion, careers, global developments, and narrative themes.

Our talented team consisted of the following excellent people: Amine Ben Ahmed, Lena de Sepibus, Olivia Rugabber, and Oscar Hellmüller. I can recommend Amine for his immense output on the sentiment analysis, Lena for a strong sense of the direction of the project, Olivia for her ability to jump in and get to grips with any problem, and Oscar for rising up to the challenge in the face of personal hardship.

My contribution was mainly to employ AutoPhrase [1] to extract general entity names from the movie plot summaries, and rank them by TF-IDF score on the timescale of decades. This idea was not original, as Lee et al. [2] performed the same analysis in 2021. Aside from that, I designed and implemented the correlation analysis of technological narrative themes to technology adoption across the world. I also helped assure general code quality, and was co-writer for the final data story.

Of course, this does not even scratch the surface of the specific techniques that go into creating films. This is but a surface-level overview of general terms such as "colour", "graphics", and "effects". For anyone looking for something deeper they can get in touch with my brother Alexandros, who graduated from film school and specialises as director of photography, gaffer, and editor on film sets in Berlin.

We put a lot of thought on our team work process and communication channels, so I am proud that the project turned out so well. I hope you enjoy reading it.

Link: Modern Times: Rise of Technology in Cinema

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Sources

1. Jingbo Shang, Jialu Liu, Meng Jiang, Xiang Ren, Clare R Voss, Jiawei Han, Automated Phrase Mining from Massive Text Corpora, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Feb. 2018.
2. Daniel Lee, Huilai Miao, and Yuxuan Fan. Analyzing Movies Using Phrase Mining. March 2021.