Power and Agency in modern films: Character portrayal analyses using computational tools

Character portrayal analyses using computational tools

Quick links: [paper] [download the connotation frames] [contact us]

How a movie character is written or portrayed influences a viewer's impression, which can in turn influence people's stereotypes on gender norms. We develop a computational framework, called connotation frames, to measure the power and agency given to characters in movies. Our new tool allows for in-depth analyses of subtle nuances in how characters are written about in movie screenplays.

AI tool to quantify power imbalance between female and male characters in movies

The team used machine-learning-based tools to analyze the language in nearly 800 movie scripts, quantifying how much power and agency those scripts give to individual characters. In their study, recently presented in Denmark at the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, the researchers found subtle but widespread gender bias in the way male and female characters are portrayed.

Gender Gap, Tool, Movie, ResearchBrigitte BellanDecember 1, 2017Movie, University of Washington, power imbalance, gender inbalance

PROJET IMPLICIT TESTS

Project Implicit is a non-profit organization and international collaboration between researchers who are interested in implicit social cognition - thoughts and feelings outside of conscious awareness and control. The goal of the organization is to educate the public about hidden biases and to provide a “virtual laboratory” for collecting data on the Internet.

2 tests are specifically relevant to gender: Gender Career Test and Gender Science Test

Go to : https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html