casts.py: A Python Program to check gender matches of names in wikipedia movie casts lists: actors / characters

version

This is beta version 0.1.1

suggested citation:

Vanneman, Reeve. 2020. "casts.py: A Python Program to Code Check Gender in Movie Cast Lists. url: https://github.com/ReeveVanneman/gender Version 0.1.1.

names

casts.py uses two sources to determine gender of a name (or some words):

• gendernames.json
• gender_guesser

It categorizes each name into:

• female
• mostly_female
• andy (androgynous)
• mostly_male
• male
• unknown (i.e., not found in either list)

arguments

casts.py is called with one argument, a prefix for input and output files. e.g., US, Fr, SK,

• python3 casts.py US

would look for a file USfiles.txt that lists all the files of cast lists from US movies It would also produce output files with the prefix US (USnames.xls, UScharacters.xls, etc.)

compiling jobs.py:

• jobs.py uses python standard packages: json sys
• jobs.py also uses python packages that must be downloaded and installed: gender_guesser BeautifulSoup

input files:

• prefix+files.txt (e.g., USfiles.txt) = a file of filenames of cast lists to be read. These are local file names (which can include absolute or relative addresses) that casts.py loops through searching for names. Typically, they are the url of the wikipedia pages for each movie.

• gendernames.json = a json file of names and words with assigned genders. This file can always be improved and updated.

The casts.py program is in 2 main sections:

• it divides each line in a cast list into 3 parts: actor name / character name / & optional additional material
  • typically: actor as character. additional material. But there are several alternative formats in the wikipedia pages.
• it assigns each actor's name and character's name a gender using (first) gendernames.json and if not there, gender_guesser
  • the first word in a name that gets an assigned gender other than "unknown" determines the assigned gender
  • for Chinese and Korean names, the program works backwards from the end
  • if none of the names are found in either list, the name is assigned "unknown"
  • for each cast line, casts.py compiles joint counts of the gender of the actor and gender of the character

output files:

( "XX" below is the prefix arg, e.g., US )

• main output: XXnames.xls
  For each unique name (either actor's or character's) it lists the counts by the 6 gender categories.

• detailed output: XXcharacter.xls
  For each line in the cast for each file in XXfiles.txt, casts.py writes one record of movie file name, the actor's and character's names and the assigned genders

• text file descriptions: XXtexts.xls
  after processing each movie, writes a count of #lines, #words, #actors, #characters, #line with additional text, #lines that are not actor/character lines.