Kinomatics: The Industrial Geometry of Culture
The Kinomatics Project collects, explores, analyses and represents data about the creative industries. Our research is collaborative and interdisciplinary. Our current focus is on the spatial and temporal dimensions of international film flow and the location of Australian live music gigs.
The Kinomatics Project collects, explores, analyses and represents data about the creative industries. Our research is collaborative and interdisciplinary. Our current focus is on the spatial and temporal dimensions of international film flow and the location of Australian live music gigs.
Kinomatics is derived from the word Kinematics; the study of the geometry of motion, and Kino; the term meaningcinema in many countries. Kinomatics is therefore the study of the industrial geometry of motion pictures. The focus ofKinomatics has been extended further in our research to mean the study of the industrial geometry of culture.
Big Cinema Data
The Kinomatics Project is one of the first ‘big data’ studies of contemporary global cultural diffusion.
Its examination of the spatial and temporal dimensions of international film flow rests on a large dataset of showtime information comprising more than 120 million records that describe every film screening in 48 countries over a 12-month period as well as additional aggregated box-office data. Through further integrating different types of data (demographic data, social media data, technical infrastructure data, economic and financial data and climatic data for example) this project will explore the value of an ‘expanded’ approach to cultural data, rather than ‘big data’ per se. Outcomes from the project will be of significant interest to both film producers and distributors with spatial and network relationships being determined from a variety of geographic, social and economic factors.
Through exploration of this dataset, The Kinomatics Project aims to develop, test, and document best-practice models for working with big cultural data. It does this in three ways:
- Through explicitly understanding the cinema as comprising interdependent, overlapping, uneven networks of institutional, social and commercial practices
- Through the collation, organization and analysis of an international (48 countries) and consistent showtime dataset comprising approximately 120 million records per year.
- Through the further expansion of this dataset with associated information such as financial, spatial and demographic data.
