Distant Viewing of the Harry Potter Movies via Computer Vision
Alina El-Keilany, Thomas Schmidt, Christian G. Wolff · Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Publications · 2022
We present an exploratory study performing distant viewing via computer vision methods in the genre of fantasy movies. As a case study we use 10 modern fantasy movies of the Harry Potter franchise (also referred to as Wizarding World franchise). We apply methods and state-of-the-art models for color and brightness analysis, object detection, location classification as well as facial emotion recognition. We present descriptive results as well as inference statistics. Furthermore, we discuss the results and the quality of the methods for this unique use case and give examples. We were able to find significant differences in our statistical analysis in the results of the methods across the movies with the movies of the Harry Potter series getting darker and negative emotional expressions on faces becoming more frequent.