Have you ever watched a movie and thought of it as data? Hopefully, if you are a long-term reader of this blog, you have learned that almost anything can be data, depending on how you conceptualize it and interact with it. For those who have been following Tartan Datascapes this summer, you've likely noticed that I've delved deeply into how data presents itself in popular culture, and as a result, how popular culture can allow us to learn more about data. The blog has featured stories on metadata in the Animal Crossing: New Horizons video game (view here), Jerry Garcia's data management guidance (view here), and Latin American comic books (view here), and this week, I'm thrilled to feature guest contributor Jon McIntire, Digitization Specialist at CMU Libraries, to talk about film as data! When we conceptualize something as data, we are understanding how that 'thing' can be extracted and analyzed in order to gain new or advanced insights about 'something' in our world. In the case of the film Valley Girl, conceptualizing this film as data allows us to better understand certain topics in linguistics, literature, and music. Want to learn more? Make some tea, grab a snack, and keep reading!
If we perceive the 1983 film Valley Girl, directed by Martha Coolidge, as a source of data, then we will discover that it contains multiple facets of information. These data facets range from adaptation to sociolect to musical genre—each with a circuitous path that merges into one unified source of data. With that said, if we apply French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss' concept of bricolage—a creation comprised of a variety of previously created sources that form a newly created source—to data, we can then consider Valley Girl a 'data bricolage,' comprised of several data sources to form a new data source. Furthermore, if we apply this data bricolage to German mathematician Hermann Minkowski's concept of the world line—a concept in theoretical physics that argues everything in the universe oroborically coalesces into tangible objects that either are destroyed and later recomposed into new objects or become part of another greater object as it moves through the confines of three-dimensional space and the fourth dimension of time—we can then begin to perceive Valley Girl as containing the entire body of data that led to its creation, the data that comprises it, and the data that would then be informed by the film as a data source. This might appear preposterous to apply these somewhat mind-bending concepts to a teen romantic comedy from the 1980s, but if we think in terms of pure data, then it can make sense.
In order to examine Valley Girl through the lens of data, we must first start with the inspirational source material for Martha Coolidge's 1983 film. Loosely adapting William Shakespeare's 16th-century masterpiece The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, Coolidge set out to update the classic with early-1980's youth culture. However, Shakespeare's tragedy was based on English poet Arthur Brooke's The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, which was a translation of a novella by Italian writer Matteo Bandello. In terms of a data bricolage, each adaptation contains elements—or data, if you will—that inform and ultimately comprise Coolidge's film. Additionally, if we look at this succession of adaptations through the lens of Minkowski's world line, then we can observe that each adaptation has modified the original through time and in varying degrees. Thus, each adaptation is a source of data that is intricately linked to and interwoven with each previous adaptation; thereby, creating a set of linked data sources over time. In the context of the world line, these data sets then continue to be modified, rearranged, restructured, etc. into a new data bricolage such as director Baz Luhrmann's 1996 adaptation Romeo + Juliet.
Data in Valley Girl can also be found in the Southern Californian sociolect spoken by valley girls in the late-1970s to early-1980s—commonly referred to as 'Valspeak'—which the film capitalized on. When applying data bricolage to Valspeak, we find that it incorporated much of the slang from Californian surf culture of the 1960s and 1970s, and created a separate culture (and therefore, a separate data set). Moreover, if we examine Valspeak as a data bricolage through the greater lens of the world line, we find that the sociolect is incorporated into this film adaptation of Shakespeare's classic in order to maintain temporal relevance and viability in American youth culture of the 1980s, leaving behind the Early Modern English used in previous versions of the play. This modification to the original data source displays the restructuring power of the world line to the data bricolage of adaptations through time; thereby, extending its data viability into the future. By logical extension, this progression branches out into a world line of data focusing on Valspeak, which is separate from the world line of data focusing on adaptation. An example of this offshoot data set is director Amy Heckerling's 1995 film Clueless, which continued the Valpseak world line originating in Valley Girl and, similarly, made modifications to it in order to maintain cultural relevance and extend its data viability. Thus, two separate world lines of data (adaptation and sociolect) merge into one data bricolage (Valley Girl) and then branch out again into two separate world lines containing elements of and informed by this data bricolage: one data set continues the world line of adaptation and the other extends the world line of Valspeak.
Similar data sources can be found in Valley Girl's soundtrack. After listening to KROQ 106.7 FM, Martha Coolidge sought out the 'newness' of New Wave bands and artists to fill film abouth early-1980s youth culture, from Modern English's 'I Melt With You' to Psychedelic Furs' 'Love My Way' to Men At Work's 'Who Can It Be Now.' Through the lens of data bricolage, New Wave music—often considered an umbrella term, meaning 'post-punk'—was comprised of various other musical genres when it first emerged in the late 1970s. Thus, several data sources such as punk, disco/dance, ska, and synthpop merged to form New Wave. However, not all of these different musical data sources needed to be present to form every piece of New Wave music; rather, the music genre's data set had more of a mix-and-match structure. Through the lens of the world line, the data bricolage of New Wave music would dissolve by the mid-1980s, but its data source would inform or create later musical data sets—data sets such as alternative, modern rock, pop, and electronic (and its subsets). Currently, the musical genre of Synthwave is wholly informed by and created from the data bricolage of New Wave music; thereby displaying the latter's data viability in the context of the world line. When factoring in New Wave music to the greater data bricolage of Valley Girl, we begin to see the recursive nature of data within the context of the world line: the data sources from various musical genres form the data bricolage of New Wave, which then merges with the data bricolages of film adaptation and Valspeak to form the greater data bricolage of Valley Girl.
Of course, literature, linguistics, and music are but a few examples of examining the film Valley Girl through the lens of data. Perceiving each of these examples as data bricolages that coalesce to form the greater data bricolage of film helps us better understand the underlying nature and inescapable structure of data. When we conceptualize these data bricolages through the world line, we can also better comprehend how data informs and/or creates other data as it merges with or branches out from other data through time. In another of Shakespeare's plays, As You Like It, the character of Jacques opens his monologue by uttering, 'All the world's a stage.' This phrase explicitly exclaims that everyone—not only the actors on the stage but the audience watching the play—perform a role in the greater play of life. Taking such an epiphanic realization one step further, we can conceptualize that all the world's one great data bricolage, the stage is but a smaller data bricolage comprising it, and we too are data bricolages performing on it as we merge with and branch out from these other sources of data that move through time on the world line. Although the data that comprises Valley Girl is much different than the data that comprises us, it and we are both data bricolages and logically, if we watch the film, then our data bricolages are informed by its data bricolage and the viewer's world line coalesces with that of the viewed...and in Valpseak, that's like totally awesome, fer shur!!!
If you are reading this blog and thinking, 'Wow, I want to study popular culture and data!' then you have a friend in CMU Libraries. Not only do we have a wide array of data professionals who can help you with all aspects of data (collection, analysis, visualization, management), we also have many folks who specialize in popular culture studies and the role that data plays in this type of research. Have an idea for a project involving popular culture and data but not sure how to get started? You can always send an email to hgunderm@andrew.cmu.edu to start the conversation!