Description
As we had a chance to observe in the first research question, we’ve seen how a TV show for kids called Robocar was able to influence heavily Google Trends searches. We decided to dig further in the past to discover how self-driving cars have been imagined by men during the last century in the movie culture. In the timeline you’ll see eighteen of the most popular movies containing self-driving cars, the year in which the story was set, to try have an idea on how our imagery about self-driving vehicles have grown and developed through time. Flying, talking, smart, futuristic, car designed has for long fascinated men and we see now some of those ideas coming into reality.
Protocol
We started by searching on Wikipedia through the related movies of the page “Autonomous car”. We then proceeded creating the dataset by inserting the date of release, the year in which the movie is set and the title. We also controlled if the director was also relevant and we focused on the U.S.A. to stick to our key definitions. For every car present in the movie we listed some of the features such as the ability to fly. We then created a timeline and elaborated an interactive visualization which allows you to see “cards” about the different models of cars we discovered. While it was a fun and creative path we decided to stick to more reliable and traditional methods to discover the public feeling about self-driving cars.
Data
Timestamp: 01/12/2016 - 05/12/2016
Data source: Wikipedia
Download data (4MB)
The dataset is an xls. file we will have the list of movies selected with name, release date, year of setting, name of the car, director, writer, features and country.