How Technological Innovation Restructures Cultural Space

Abstract

What this is. The film-level data behind the article How Technological Innovation Restructures Cultural Space: Digital Effects, Narrative Convergence, and the Concentration of Economic and Symbolic Capital in American Film, 1980–2024 (Poetics). It covers 7,868 U.S. films with production-technology records: VFX technology parameters, plot texts and LLM-rewritten plot summaries, the analysis variables used in the regressions, narrative-trope annotations, box-office and award data, and matched user reviews. README.md documents every file (row counts, columns, construction) and maps each figure and table of the article to the files needed to reproduce it; CHECKSUMS.md5 lists MD5 sums. Files are zipped by folder so that parts can be downloaded separately. Sources. Each component was compiled from a third-party source and is redistributed here only to the extent needed to verify and reproduce the published analyses: shotonwhat.zip — production-technology parameters (cameras, VFX facilities, VFX tools, etc.) collected from the public pages of ShotOnWhat.com in 2025 and 2026. Content remains the property of ShotOnWhat and its contributors. descriptions.zip — film metadata derived from the IMDb non-commercial datasets and IMDb pages; plot sections and article text from the English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; attribution to Wikipedia contributors); plot summaries rewritten by a language model (gpt-4o-mini) from those texts; supplementary descriptions from Letterboxd/TMDB and non-English Wikipedias for a small number of films. variables.zip — the analysis variables derived from the above and from the author's own coding. tropes.zip — narrative-trope annotations from TVTropes.org as released by Gala et al. (2020), with the author's canonicalisation map. TVTropes content is licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. boxoffice_awards.zip — box-office figures from Box Office Mojo (IMDb) and award nominations from IMDb. reviews.zip — IMDb user reviews matched to the sample films, taken from a publicly posted Kaggle dump of IMDb reviews. The reviews are the copyrighted writing of their individual authors. Terms of use. This deposit is released under CC BY-NC 4.0 for the compilation, selection and derived variables created by the author. It does not transfer or override the rights of the original data owners. By downloading these files you agree that: (1) use is limited to non-commercial academic research, teaching and the verification or replication of the published results; (2) the third-party content (IMDb, Box Office Mojo, ShotOnWhat, TVTropes, Wikipedia, Letterboxd/TMDB, user reviews) is subject to the respective sites' terms of use and licences, which you are responsible for observing, and must not be re-published, re-sold, bundled into other datasets or used to rebuild or substitute for those services; (3) the review texts and crew names are not to be used to identify, profile or contact individuals, and no attempt will be made to re-identify review authors; (4) the LLM-rewritten summaries are derived research texts, not authoritative plot descriptions, and should not be presented as such; (5) any publication using these data cites this deposit and the article, and acknowledges the original sources named above. The author makes no warranty as to the completeness or accuracy of third-party content and accepts no liability for downstream use. Takedown. If you are a rights holder and believe that material in this deposit exceeds fair use for research, contact the author and the item will be reviewed and, where appropriate, removed or restricted. Not included. Program code (available from the author), the trained word-embedding models, the raw review dump, and the non-U.S. ShotOnWhat sample used in one appendix figure.