A city that can be "all the things": competing/changing/conflicting images of Las Vegas in mainstream US films

About the project data

I sourced the data for the visualizations on genre and plot elements from IMDB. I originally wanted to use information from the American Film Catalog as the entries are highly informative and generated by professional staff who understand the historical context of the films they curate for the catalog. If the catalog designated that Las Vegas constituted a significant location in the film, I felt I could trust that information was accurate because that tag was put in place by someone who was paid to watch and research the film. However, there is no simple way to retrieve information from the AFI website in a way that would be immediately useful for data visualization. So, at the suggestion of Dr. Miriam Posner and UCLA Librarian Diana King, I turned to IMDB to create the dataset for this project.

Dr. Zoe Borovsky, the UCLA Librarian for Digital Research and Scholarship walked me through the process of turning an IMDB page into an entry in a data spreadsheet. I started with search results from two types of IMDB searches: a search for films with the keywords "Las Vegas" and "Casino" and a search for films with a shooting location of Las Vegas, Nevada. Because there were thousands of entries in the shooting location list, I narrowed down the list of potential films by focusing on the top 200 films by US Box Office. My reasoning was that this would add the most relevant and widely seen films to my dataset. The search keywords list resulted in less than 200 movies, so I used all the entries in that list. From there, all the search results were imported into Zotero and exported as CSV files. I cross-referenced the results from the CSV files created from the two searches to further refine the list to focus on movies about Las Vegas and casinos that were shot on-location in the city. (Belatedly, I realized that this may have been an over-processing of the data because I was already doing research on the specific topic of on-location filming inside of Strip casinos. In a future versions of this project, I would like to see what sticking with a "messy" and "nonscalable" version of the IMDB data might yield.) I finished cleaning the data by using OpenRefine to remove duplicates, white space, and edit other extraneous or missing information.

For the processing of my dataset, I used Tableau for visualizations of the relationship between year of release and genre in the corpus of Las Vegas films in the forms of a stacked bar chart, a packed bubbles chart, and a treemap. Then, I used Voyant Tools to do text analysis of the user generated tags and loglines associated with the films resulting in a word cloud and a bubbles visualization of the most frequently used words from the tags and loglines.

Lastly, I was not able to use my IMDB data set for the mapping of Las Vegas filming locations that I wanted to make. I thought that this map or list of information already existed somewhere online, but couldn't find anything extensive. Instead, I used the location information from the book World Film Locations: Las Vegas to create a simple CSV file in plain text format and then used the addresses from those location with an online geocoding tool to find the latitude and longitude information that would be needed to turn the information into a map in Tableau. I ran into some issues with the geocoder not recognizing the addresses I entered, but that was resolved once I remembered a crucial fact: the Las Vegas Strip is not actually located in Las Vegas the city. My page with the map of filming locations helps to see how mainstream films about Las Vegas are not only limited in their thematic scope but their geographic scope as well.

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