Tracing Signs of Urbanity in the Finnish Fiction Film of the 1950s: Toward a Multimodal Analysis of Audiovisual Data

Proceedings of the 6th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference (DHNB 2022), Long Papers, Volume 3232, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, issue 3232

Abstract

This paper traces signs of urban culture in Finnish fiction films from the 1950s by drawing on a multimodal analysis of audiovisual content. The Finnish National Filmography includes 208 feature films released between 1950-1959. Our approach to the automatic analysis of media content includes aural and visual object recognition and speech recognition. We concentrate on features that epitomize urbanity, including visual objects, such as forms of transportation (cars, horses) and sounds (rural and urban sounds, speech). Based on the scores and frequencies of these recognitions, we observe quantitative changes that took place during the 1950s. The paper demonstrates that aural and visual object recognition, as well as speech recognition, can successfully be applied in film historical analysis. The overall results support the idea that Finnish filmmakers fueled the imagination of urban life in the 1950s, paving the way for modern technologies and gradually pushing aside the signs of rural life.

Description

Funding Information: This work was supported by the research consortium Movie Making Finland: Finnish fiction films as audiovisual big data, 1907-2017 (MoMaF), funded by the Academy of Finland (329266). Film data and metadata were provided by the National Audiovisual Institute in Finland and computational resources by CSC-IT Center for Science, Espoo, Finland. Funding Information: This work was supported by the research consortium Movie Making Finland: Finnish fiction films as audiovisual big data, 1907–2017 (MoMaF), funded by the Academy of Finland (329266). Film data and metadata were provided by the National Audiovisual Institute in Finland and computational resources by CSC—IT Center for Science, Espoo, Finland. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Keywords

automatic speech recognition, computer vision, film history, media analysis, modernization, multimodal analysis, object detection

Citation

Grósz, T, Kallioniemi, N, Kiiskinen, H, Laine, K, Moisio, A, Römpötti, T, Virkkunen, A, Salmi, H, Kurimo, M & Laaksonen, J 2022, Tracing Signs of Urbanity in the Finnish Fiction Film of the 1950s: Toward a Multimodal Analysis of Audiovisual Data . in Proceedings of the 6th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference (DHNB 2022), Long Papers . vol. 3232, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, no. 3232, CEUR, pp. 63-78, Digital Parliamentary Data in Action, Uppsala, Sweden, 15/03/2022 . < http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3232/paper05.pdf >

Permanent link to this item

https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202210266249

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[article-cris] Perustieteiden korkeakoulu / SCI

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Tracing Signs of Urbanity in the Finnish Fiction Film of the 1950s: Toward a Multimodal Analysis of Audiovisual Data

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