Description

This visualization glimpses the evolution of the imaginary about Mars that storytellers have developed from 1910 to 2015. We found it interesting to focus on key words to help the readers understand quicker the conception of the different scriptwriters. On the left column are set the different keywords that categorized the plot of the movie. On the top is the timeline of the movies, the movies aren’t represented alone but by groups of 30 years. We decided to make a bigger focus over the year 2000 and 2010 because of the rising production. This infographic helps to understand the evolution of the different topics linked to Mars during the evolution of the cinema.

Notice that the negative evolution of one category doesn’t mean that it’s loosing its existence, it means that somehow another category was found more relevant. It is the case for scientist that is gradually overtaken by “human on Mars”. Another example is the space communication that appears only in the 70’s.

Finally, you can see that the word NASA have taken a greater importance (at least in the plot of the film) from 1995.

Protocol

From the page “List of films set on Mars” of Wikipedia, we collected a list of movies from 1910 to 2015. (In which three were unfit for the purposes of this analysis and were thus excluded.) We then extract the text of the plot of each film from “imdb.com”.

Secondly, we made a complete analyze of this corpus thanks to Tag Cloud Generator. We had to remove unfit words in order to keep only common names. This words were then studied and distributed in 10 categories. The last part consisted in regrouping all the results by slice of 30 years, with the aim of making it easier and more logical to understand. We just let a bigger focus for the years 00’s and 20’s because of the greater movie production. Finally, we introduced the word NASA in the graphic to underline it’s growing importance.

Data

Timestamp: 01/12/2016 - 20/12/2016

Data source: IMDb

Download data (1MB)

This data regroups the list of the 28th films set on Mars, their tag cloud and their organization into categories (in this last part, only common names were kept).