Studies of gender inequality in film industries have noted the persistence of male domination in creative roles (usually defined as director, producer, writer) and the slow pace of reform. Typical policy remedies are premised on aggregate counts of women as a proportion of overall industry participation. Network science offers an alternative way of identifying and proposing change mechanisms, as it puts emphasis on relationships instead of individuals. Preliminary work on applying network analysis to understand inequality in the film industry has been undertaken. However, in this study we offer a comprehensive approach that enables us to not only understand what inequality in the film industry looks like through the lens of network science but also how we can attempt to address this issue. We offer a datadriven simulation framework that investigates various what-if scenarios when it comes to network evolution. We then assess each of these scenarios with respect to its potential to address gender inequality in the film industry. As suggested by previous studies, inequality is exacerbated when industry networks are most closed. We review evidence from three different national film industries on network relationships in creative teams and identify a high proportion of men who only work with other men. In response to this observation, we test several mechanisms through which industry structures may generate higher levels of openness. Our results reveal that the most critical factor for improving network openness is not simply the statistical improvement of the number of women in a network, nor the removal of men who do not work with women. The most likely behavioural changes to a network will involve the production of connections between women and powerful men.

This article draws on a big cultural dataset of over 130 million global screen times to consider the impact that the gender of a film's director has on the screening prevalence and geographic spread of new release feature films at the cinema. We compare results based on film screenings between December 2012 and May 2015 across a set of forty countries including the United States,

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In recent years a renewed interest has emerged in how public service media (PSM) generate public value, putting emphasis on how such value may express itself in multidimensional and non-linear ways. Yet, little has been achieved in systematically studying these ways and providing evidence to policymakers. In this paper, we propose that content diversity in TV programmes and the extent to which PSM collaborate with external partners could serve as quantifiable markers enabling the measurement of multidimensional public value creation. We also propose the utilization of a yet untapped resource for this purpose - data from broadcasters’ broadcast management systems (BMSs). Based on a comprehensive case study - Estonia’s public broadcaster ERR - we demonstrate a set of approaches to facilitate such analysis. These tools enabled us to show how a small PSM struggles with sustainable public value creation.

Film festivals are a key component in the global film industry in terms of trendsetting, publicity, trade, and collaboration. We present an unprecedented analysis of the international film festival circuit, which has so far remained relatively understudied quantitatively, partly due to the limited availability of suitable data sets. We use large-scale data from the Cinando platform of the Cannes Film Market, widely used by industry professionals. We explicitly model festival events as a global network connected by shared films, and quantify festivals as aggregates of the metadata of their showcased films. Importantly, we argue against using simple count distributions for discrete labels such as language or production country, as such categories are typically not equidistant. Rather, we propose embedding them in continuous latent vector spaces. We demonstrate how these “festival embeddings” provide insight into changes in programmed content over time, predict festival connections, and can be used to measure diversity in film festival programming across various cultural, social, and geographical variables---which all constitute an aspect of public value creation by film festivals. Our results provide a novel mapping of the film festival circuit between 2009--2021 (616 festivals, 31,989 unique films), highlighting festival types that occupy specific niches, diverse series, and those that evolve over time. We also discuss how these quantitative findings fit into media studies and research on public value creation by cultural industries. With festivals occupying a central position in the film industry, investigations into the data they generate hold opportunities for researchers to better understand industry dynamics and cultural impact, and for organizers, policymakers, and industry actors to make more informed, data-driven decisions. We hope our proposed methodological approach to festival data paves way for more comprehensive film festival studies and large-scale quantitative cultural event analytics in general.