Abstract
Machine vision algorithms play a significant role in managing the traffic of images and influencing the opinions and behavior of people in everyday life by ranking, filtering, predicting, deciding, censoring, recognizing and generating images. The tools employing specifically designed machine vision algorithms are also being used to analyze gender perspective in films. The results are effective for policymaking and creating awareness for gender imbalance in film culture. Machine vision systems provide new ways to study moving images Adopting an experimental approach, this chapter looks at women images in films through commercially available machine vision systems and discuss whether we can also learn about machine ways of seeing by looking at films through these systems.
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Notes
- 1.
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- 7.
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- 13.
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References
Agarwal, Apoorv, Zheng, Jiehan, Kamath, Shruti Vasanth, Balasubramanian, Sriram, Dey, Shirin Ann. 2015. Semantic Scholar. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/dfaf/97f709be25faceb91e218964bd288a138e0e.pdf. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Anderson, Steve F. 2017. Technologies of Vision: The War Between Data and Images. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Arnold, Taylor, Tilton, Lauren. 2019. Distant viewing: analyzing large visual corpora. Distant Viewing. https://www.distantviewing.org/pdf/distant-viewing.pdf. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Bogost, Ian. 2007. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bogost, Ian. 2008. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Buolamwini, Joy. 2016. InCoding — In The Beginning Was The Coded Gaze. MIT Media Lab. https://medium.com/mit-media-lab/incoding-in-the-beginning-4e2a5c51a45d. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Garber, Megan. 2015. Call It the ‘Bechdel-Wallace Test’. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/call-it-the-bechdel-wallace-test/402259/. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Gates, Kelly, A. 2011. Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance. New York: NYU Press.
Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. N/A. The Reel Truth: Women Aren’t Seen or Heard. Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. https://seejane.org/wp-content/uploads/gdiq-reel-truth-women-arent-seen-or-heard-automated-analysis.pdf. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Gillespie, Tarleton. 2016. Algorithm. In Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture, ed. Benjamin Peters, 18–30. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Google. 2019. How Google uses pattern recognition to make sense of images Google Policies. https://policies.google.com/technologies/pattern-recognition?hl=en. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14, 3: 575–599.
Hickey, Walt, Koeze, Ella, Dottle, Rachael, Wezerek, Gus. 2017. We pitted 50 movies against 12 new ways of measuring Hollywood’s gender imbalance. FiveThirtyEight. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/next-bechdel/. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Hoelzl, Ingrid, Marie, Remi. 2016. From the Kino-Eye to the Postimage. Fotomuseum Winterthur. https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/29090_from_the_kino_eye_to_the_postimage. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Jang, Ji Yoon, Lee, Sangyoon, Lee, Byungjoo. 2019. Quantification of Gender Representation Bias in Commercial Films based on Image Analysis. ACM Digital Library. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3359300. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Johnston, John. 1999. Machinic Vision. Critical Inquiry 26, 1: 27–48.
Karlsson, Joe. 2015. Bechdel Test Visualizer. Joe Karlsson Portfolio. https://www.joekarlsson.com/portfolio/bechdel-test-visualizer/. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Kitchin, Rob. 2017. Thinking critically about and researching algorithms. Information, Communication & Society 20, 1: 14–29.
Kolkman, Daan, Kemper, Jakko. 2017. Glitch Studies and the Ambiguous Objectivity of Algorithms. SSRN. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2985424. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Laboria Cuboniks. 2015. Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation. Laboria Cuboniks. https://www.laboriacuboniks.net/20150612-xf_layout_web.pdf. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 1998. Gender and Sexuality, Introduction. In The Visual Culture Reader, ed Nicholas Mirzoeff, 391–397. London: Routledge.
Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen 16, 3: 6–18.
Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press.
Paglen, Trevor. 2016. Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You). The New Inquiry. https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-you/. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Rainie, Lee, Anderson, Janna. 2017. Code-Dependent: Pros and Cons of the Algorithm Age. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2017/02/08/code-dependent-pros-and-cons-of-the-algorithm-age/. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Rettberg, Walker, Jill. 2017. Machine Vision in Everyday Life: Playful Interactions with Visual Technologies in Digital Art, Games, Narratives and Social Media. Jill/txt. http://jilltxt.net/wp-content/uploads/MachineVision-B1-Jill-Walker_Rettberg-ERC-CoG-2017.pdf. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Ryzik, Melani. (2018). Is Your Script Gender-Balanced? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/movies/is-your-script-gender-balanced-try-this-test.html. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Seaver, Nick. 2017. Algorithms as culture: Some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems. Big Data & Society. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053951717738104. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Silberg, Jake, Manyika, James. 2019. Notes from the AI frontier: Tackling bias in AI. McKinsey Global Institute. https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Featured%20Insights/Artificial%20Intelligence/Tackling%20bias%20in%20artificial%20intelligence%20and%20in%20humans/MGI-Tackling-bias-in-AI-June-2019.ashx. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Snyder, Wesley E., Qi, Hairong. 2006. Machine Vision. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Steiger, Kay. 2011. No Clean Slate: Unshakeable race and gender politics in The Walking Dead. In Triumph of The Walking Dead, ed. James Lowder, 99–114. Dallas: BenBella Books.
Striphas, Ted. 2015. Algorithmic culture. European Journal of Cultural Studies. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1367549415577392. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Vertov, Dziga. 1984. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Virilio, Paul. 1994. The Vision Machine. London: British Film Institute.
Wevers, Melvin, Smits, Thomas. 2019. The visual digital turn: Using neural networks to study historical images. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. https://academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/llc/fqy085/5296356. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Wojcik, Stefan, Remy, Emma, Baronavski, Chris. 2019. How does a computer ‘see’ gender?. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/interactives/how-does-a-computer-see-gender/. Accessed 15 February 2020.
Woolf, Virginia. 2000. A Room of One’s Own: And, Three Guineas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Filmography
The Seashell and the Clergyman (Germaine Dulac, 1928).
Marianne and Juliane (Margarethe von Trotta, 1981).
Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985).
The Day I Became a Woman (Marzieh Meshkini, 2000).
The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008).
Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1928).
Software
Google Cloud Vision API.
Amazon Rekognition.
Microsoft Azure Computer Vision API.
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Sezen, D. (2020). Machine Gaze on Women: How Everyday Machine-Vision-Technologies See Women in Films. In: Sezen, D., Çiçekoğlu, F., Tunç, A., Thwaites Diken, E. (eds) Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_15
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