movienetdata

This is a data package containing character interaction data for a number of popular films. The package is designed to play well with the charinet package for character interaction network analysis (under development), but the data can be used for any purpose.

The films currently contained in the package are:

• the first 18 films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (from Iron Man (2008) to Black Panther (2018));
• the 4 films in The Hunger Games series (2012-2015);
• the 3 Tomb Raider films, including the two Lara Croft: Tomb Raider films (2001-2003) as well as the 2018 reboot;
• 5 miscellaneous other films (Frozen (2013), The Breakfast Club (1985), Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), Alien (1979), and Wonder Woman (2017).

The data were gathered as part of my research on using character networks to study the representation of women in film. To learn more about that research, a good place to start is this paper.

Format

Each film is stored as a list containing three elements:

1. The event list. Each row contains information on a line of dialogue, with columns corresponding to eventID, sceneID, speakerID, and dummy variables for each recipient.
2. The node list. Rows correspond to named speaking characters, with columns corresponding to variables for ID, name, total lines spoken (nlines), total times spoken to (linesin), and gender.
3. The adjacency matrix. This is derived from the event list through aggregation and can be useful for static purposes such as visualising the network as a sociogram.

Installation

You can install the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("pj398/movienetdata")

Example

Load data:

library(movienetdata)
data("mcu01_ironman", package = "movienetdata")

# or assign the data
iron_man <- movienetdata::mcu01_ironman

Access specific elements by name or by indexing the list:

# Get the nodes by name
mcu01_ironman$node_list

# Get the nodes by indexing
mcu01_ironman[[2]]

Browse the full list of movies by running:

data(package = "movienetdata")

Usage

Feel free to use the data for whatever you want. To cite the data, either cite the package directly (e.g. via citation(package = "movienetdata")) or the relevant publication from my associated research.

References

Jones, Pete. 2020. “Diana in the World of Men: a character network approach to analysing gendered vocal representation in Wonder Woman.” Feminist Media Studies 20 (1): 18-34. DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2018.1510846.