Date: April 13, Monday

Time: 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM

Location: LIB 1113

Guest Speaker: Simon Schweighofer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

Abstract:

Even in the digital age, film is still a medium of outstanding importance. The heroes, villains, and everyday characters on screen reflect, but also shape, society’s values, ideals, and expectations. Consequently, there is a large literature on representational issues in film, in particular regarding gender. The focus of this literature is mostly on the number of female characters. In our research, we focus on how female characters are embedded in the narrative structure of the movie – their relational marginalization. To this purpose, we have created a dataset of over 2400 movie networks, based on digitized screenplays. We found that relational marginalization of female characters is even more severe than expected based on their relative number. Over time, however, relational marginalization has somewhat decreased, mostly due to an increasing number of female writers. We also analyze interaction effects with genre and the actor’s age.

Bio:

Simon Schweighofer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. His research focuses on online data (especially text), social networks, and the roots of political polarization. He has published in renowned journals, such as Policy & Internet, Chaos, and EPJ Data Science, and presented his research in various international conferences, among them the International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), the Conference of the International Society of Research on Emotion (ISRE), and Complex Networks.

This event is co-organized by the Digital Technology and Society Cluster and the Cluster for Gender and Global China.