Visualizing and Analyzing the Hollywood Screenplay with ScripThreads

Abstract

Of all narrative textual forms, the motion picture screenplay may be the most perfectly pre-disposed for computational analysis. Screenplays contain capitalized character names, indented dialogue, and other formatting conventions that enable an algorithmic approach to analyzing and visualizing film narratives. In this article, the authors introduce their new tool, ScripThreads, which parses screenplays, outputs statistical values which can be analyzed, and offers four different types of visualization, each with its own utility. The visualizations represent character interactions across time as a single 3D or 2D graph. The authors model the utility of the tool for the close analysis of a single film (Lawrence Kasdan’s Grand Canyon [1991]). They also model how the tool can be used for “distant reading” by identifying patterns of character presence across a dataset of 674 screenplays.