The Kinomatics Australian Film Production Dataset

This is the public repository for the Kinomatics Australian Film Production Dataset, a large, curated dataset describing Australian feature film production and personnel over a fifty year period from 1975 to 2024 (as of version 1.1.0; versions 1.0.x cover the period 1975-2022). Here, we briefly describe the contents of this repository, which are explained in more detail in the dataset’s technical documentation.

We have also written a research data paper to accompany the dataset, which focuses less on the technical details and more on motivating the dataset itself and the decisions we made in deciding its scope and coverage. This data paper is published in the open access Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences and can be viewed at https://doi.org/10.1163/24523666-bja10048. (NB: The counts, figures and tables presented in the data paper are accurate to version 1.0.2 of the dataset.)

Repository contents

Data files

There are two main data files that form this dataset. The first is films.csv, a table where each row corresponds to a unique film in the dataset, and the columns contain variables describing those films.

The second is roles.csv, a table where each row corresponds to an instance of a person filling a role on a film, and the columns contain variables describing that role (including identifiers for the film and the person).

Documentation

The technical documentation of the dataset is presented in the technical_documentation.pdf file. Here, we provide a detailed account of the data collection, validation and preparation processes. We also provide tables describing each column in each of the data files.

Change log

The file changelog.pdf documents changes between released versions of the dataset.

Issues

For any issues related to the dataset or this repository, please contact either of the lead authors Pete Jones (pete@petejon.es) or Deb Verhoeven (deb.verhoeven@ualberta.ca) and let us know what the problem is and how we can fix it.