Multi-level Visual Exploration of High-dimensional Spaces

The increasing size and dimensionality of datasets in the humanities pose new challenges to scholars working with them, including establishing an overview over the dataset, connecting concepts, developing new hypotheses, and testing them. Material, pattern, and texture aesthetics in moving images is an attractive example of such multi-dimensional datasets in film studies, as an almost infinite number of combinations thereof are possible. Clustering techniques such as t-SNE are popular automated methods to organize these complex datasets, but they bring little or no-semantic meaning to their grouping strategies. We pro- pose a novel interactive visualization technique for multi-level hierarchical exploration of clustered features, named Sankey- Bridges. Our technique allows the users to (1) abstract local and global semantics from the automated methods, (2) extract relevant relationships, and (3) quantify them. Our technique is embedded in a system with other interactive visual components combined with exhaustive computational methods. The proposed solution is able to convey the global and local structure of high-dimensional clustered data sets and the relationship between different groups of features. The resulting visualization tool is embedded in the well-established VIAN [HBRFP19] research framework. We illustrate the benefits of our approach in the context of typical film researchers’ investigation of relationships in high-dimensional spaces, and a wide range of qualitative analysis labels, with examples from an extensive film database

Everything is illuminated. Zur numerischen Analyse von Farbigkeit in Filmen

The article analyses the composition of colour in the mise-en-scène of the zombie-movies REC, 28 Days Later and World War Z via a computer based approach. It first evaluates some of the methodological problems of common colour-quantisation by using clustering-algorithms in the context of film studies, then a new developed process is presented which builds on the theory of colour contrasts by Johannes Itten. A simple statistical analysis of two contrast ratios for each of the movies demonstrates that this approach is capable of providing detailed insights into the composition of colour in movies in general. Furthermore, the analysis of the three movies reveals that the accentuation of colour contrast relations serves different functions: colours can support the narrative structure of the movie, emphasize repeating motifs or establish an autonomous aesthetic space