ERIC S. RABKIN Associate Provost for Online Education Stony Brook University RAINER HILSCHER

1. PEOPLE HEAR THE TITLE FIRST:A Mixed-Method Study of the Cultural Place of Science Fiction Across Media, Genres, and Decades ERIC S. RABKIN Associate Provost for Online Education Stony Brook University RAINER HILSCHER Epidemiology Univ of Michigan 06 Sep 2013

2. Hypothesis Science Fiction, even viewed only by its titles, serves cultural roles that vary systematically across media, genres, and decades.

3. Hypothesis Science Fiction, even viewed only by its titles, serves cultural roles that vary systematically across media, genres, and decades. Corollary 1: Culturecan be understood as a complex adaptive system. Corollary 2: Science Fiction is a useful test case for cultural analysis. Corollary 3: Cultural analysis can gain from the study of titling patterns.

4. Hypothesis Science Fiction, even viewed only by its titles, serves cultural roles that vary systematically across media, genres, and decades. Corollary 1: Culturecan be understood as a complex adaptive system. Corollary 2: Science Fiction is a useful test case for cultural analysis. Corollary 3: Cultural analysis can gain from the study of titling patterns. Step 1: Study of SF short stories and TIME Magazine Step 2: Study of titling patterns for works of fiction

5. Relations of Fiction and Non-Fiction

6. Why Science Fiction? http://www.umich.edu/~genreevo

7. TIME Magazine Cover Subjects 1935-1955

8. % Heroism Themes in 20th C. American SF Stories

9. TIME Magazine Cover Subjects 1920-1940

10. SF Short Story Title-Word Cloud Zachary C. Wright, 2010, using GEP data on wordle.net

11. Titles … 1) Label 2) EngageProspectivelyRetrospectively 3) Categorize

12. Comparability of Short Story Data Sets

13. Normalizing Algorithm Download and read ISFDB, IMDB, and GEP databases into a common database coding for titles, time period, genre, and medium in order to generate title-word frequency lists with a cut-off of top twenty. (Non-English words, which were few, were excluded via a list produced by inspection and filtering with a regular expression.) Merge words that form a logical unit (e.g., “Flash Gordon”) that should not be counted individually. Tokenize title words using the Python NLTK package. Apply two regular expressions, one to identify words that contain only English letters and are at least two letters long and one to identify references to years (shown by inspection to be, in practice, all instances of four-digit numbers). Filter with a stop list words of low discriminatory power in this context (e.g., articles and pronouns). Filter with a custom-made stop list generated by inspection (e.g., some foreign words such as “du,” “en,” and “il”). Custom lemmatize (a) to supplement omissions in NTLK’s lemmatizer and (b) to create hypernyms (e.g. “girl” and “woman” subsumed under “girl-woman”). Check for titles with the same word used at least twice, returning “n-occurences” and a single token for that word in that title. Final set of processed title words were output to Excel for further analysis.

14. SF Story Title-Word Frequencies Across Datasets

15. Comparisons of Medium and Genre

16. SF Title-Word Frequencies Across Media

17. SF Title Words in Stories and Movies

18. Movie Title-Word Frequencies Across Genres (I)

19. Movie Title-Word Frequencies Across Genres (II)

20. Longitudinal Analysis

21. SF Story Title-Word Frequencies By Decade

22. Mars-Titled Novels (1952)

23. Most Popular Mars-Titled Films of the 1950s

24. IMDB “Mars” collocations by genre

25. Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway) is a glamorous fashion photographer who specializes in stylized violence. Amid controversy over whether her photographs glorify violence and are demeaning to women, Laura begins seeing, in first person through the eyes of the killer, real-time visions of the murders of her friends and colleagues. John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones), the lieutenant in charge of the case, shows Laura unpublished police photographs of unsolved murders that very closely mirror Laura's fashion shoots. Laura's visions continue, including visions of the killer stalking her and continuing to murder those around her. Meanwhile, Laura and Neville fall in love. The murders continue as Laura's various colleagues, acquaintances and past romantic interests come in and out of focus as potential suspects or victims, until a final confrontation between Laura and the killer occurs. At her apartment, Laura is affected by one last vision of the killer, who has now come for her. The killer attempts to break in through her front door, but Laura deadbolts it before he/she can enter. Upon hearing her distress, Neville (who had been on his way to meet her) breaks through her balcony window. He proceeds to tell Laura they have caught the killer, a troubled colleague of hers named Tommy, and begins an elaborate explanation of Tommy's motivations and back story. Knowing Tommy well, Laura recognizes this as a lie and that Neville himself is the killer. As Neville details more of his own story, it is implied that he may have multiple personalities. Because of this, and his love for her, he cannot bring himself to murder her and instead asks that she end his life. She shoots him dead, calling the police as we close in on her eyes -- the eyes of Laura Mars.– Wikipedia (May 11, 2013) Eyes of Laura Mars

26. Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway) is a glamorous fashionphotographer who specializes in stylized violence. Amid controversy over whether her photographs glorify violence and are demeaning to women, Laura begins seeing, in first person through the eyes of the killer, real-time visions of the murders of her friends and colleagues. John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones), the lieutenant in charge of the case, shows Laura unpublished police photographs of unsolved murders that very closely mirror Laura's fashion shoots. Laura's visions continue, including visions of the killer stalking her and continuing to murder those around her. Meanwhile, Laura and Neville fall in love. The murders continue as Laura's various colleagues, acquaintances and past romantic interests come in and out of focus as potential suspects or victims, until a final confrontation between Laura and the killer occurs. At her apartment, Laura is affected by one last vision of the killer, who has now come for her. The killer attempts to break in through her front door, but Laura deadbolts it before he/she can enter. Upon hearing her distress, Neville (who had been on his way to meet her) breaks through her balcony window. He proceeds to tell Laura they have caught the killer, a troubled colleague of hers named Tommy, and begins an elaborate explanation of Tommy's motivations and back story. Knowing Tommy well, Laura recognizes this as a lie and that Neville himself is the killer. As Neville details more of his own story, it is implied that he may have multiple personalities. Because of this, and his love for her, he cannot bring himself to murder her and instead asks that she end his life. She shoots him dead, calling the police as we close in on her eyes -- the eyes of Laura Mars.– Wikipedia (May 11, 2013) Eyes of Laura Mars

27. Laura Mars – French poster

28. PEOPLE HEAR THE TITLE FIRST

29. Abstract People Hear the Title First: A Mixed-Method Study of the Cultural Place of Science Fiction Across Media, Genres, and Decades Michigan Complexity Mini-Conference 13 May 2013 Eric S. Rabkin, English Language & Literature and Art & Design, University of Michigan Rainer Hilscher, Epidemiology, University of Michigan