Brian Yecies

Mining Chinese social media UGC: a big-data framework for analyzing Douban movie reviews

AbstractAnalysis of online user-generated content is receiving attention for its wide applications from both academic researchers and industry stakeholders. In this pilot study, we address common Big Data problems of time constraints and memory costs involved with using standard single-machine hardware and software. A novel Big Data processing framework is proposed to investigate a niche subset of user-generated popular culture content on Douban, a well-known Chinese-language online social network. Huge data samples are harvested via an asynchronous scraping crawler. We also discuss how to manipulate heterogeneous features from raw samples to facilitate analysis of various film details, review comments, and user profiles on Douban with specific regard to a wave of South Korean films (2003–2014), which have increased in popularity among Chinese film fans. In addition, an improved Apriori algorithm based on MapReduce is proposed for content-mining functions. An exploratory simulation of results demonstrates the flexibility and applicability of the proposed framework for extracting relevant information from complex social media data, knowledge which can in turn be extended beyond this niche dataset and used to inform producers and distributors of films, television shows, and other digital media content.

Transnational collaboration of the multisensory kind: Exploiting Korean 4D cinema in China

This article explores how technicians working in the cinema exhibition arm of the Korean conglomerate CJ Global are pioneering the diffusion of four-dimensional (4D) motion widescreen cinema technology. It analyzes the 4D work-flow processes being developed to connect Asian and Hollywood films with local audiences via motion and environmental special effects, as well as some of the cultural assumptions underlying this new technology transfer. As a case study, this article investigates how the Korean 4D team in Beijing is seeking to appeal to Chinese audiences through this innovative process, while assisting CJ Global’s expansion across China and the world. This study sheds light on a new type of inconspicuous transnational collaboration that is enabling Korean post-production practitioners to contribute to the expansion of the film industry in China and its integration of technical innovation and ideas from outside the country.

In search of the Korean digital wave

This article sets the context for this special themed issue on the ‘Korean digital wave’ by considering the symbiotic relationship between digital technologies, their techniques and practices, their uses and the affordances they provide, and Koreas ‘compressed modernity’ and swift industrialisation. It underscores the importance of interrogating a range of groundbreaking developments and innovations within Koreas digital mediascapes, and its creative and cultural industries, in order to gain a complex understanding of one of Australias most significant export markets and trading partners. Given the financial and political commitment in Australia to a high-speed broadband network that aims to stimulate economic and cultural activity, recent technological developments in Korea, and the double-edged role played by government policy in shaping the ‘Korean digital wave’, merit close attention from media and communications scholars.

Projecting Sounds of Modernity: The Rise of the Local ‘Talkie’ Technology in the Australian Cinema, 1924–1932

This article analyses the distinct local responses to the coming of sound to the Australian cinema and examines the reactions to the American modernisation of the motion picture industry. The story documents how sound technology was promoted by the trade press, inventors, and the American electrical companies, each with a different agenda. The most active Australian sound systems and companies are discussed and located within the context of modernity. Film Weekly and Everyones, Australias two major film industry trade magazines at the time, promoted the coming of sound as a technology battle—a ‘Talkie War’. Hollywood film distributors were portrayed as military victors in a ‘war’ to wire Australia with American technology. It is hoped to offer a richer and more complex understanding of the rise and development of sound technology by presenting new research on this, a largely unknown aspect of Australian film history.

Korean-Chinese Film Remakes in a New Age of Cultural Globalisation: Miss Granny (2014) and 20 Once Again (2015) along the Digital Road

Since the early 2000s, the Korean Wave (aka Hallyu) has influenced Greater China in enterprising and complex ways that diverge from the ways in which Hallyu has impacted other markets. At the same time, since China joined the Word Trade Organization in 2001, art, culture and media production have been largely transformed from vehicles for state propaganda into new gateways for producing and showcasing popular commercial entertainment. Korean producers have played a significant role in this evolving transformation, albeit in a cultural space that the Government of Mainland China still uses and shapes as an important mouthpiece of the Party-state. While media headlines accentuate these progressive pathways, there is a dearth of scholarly commentary on the ways in which Korean film practitioners are contributing to this new era of cultural globalisation in China. To shed light on this emerging topic, the authors examine Chinese audiences’ reception of the Korean film Miss Granny (2014) and the most successful Korean–Chinese co-production to date, its Chinese remake 20 Once Again (2015). The article utilises data drawn from Douban, a major Chinese entertainment and popular culture social networking site, to assess the ‘inconspicuous’ impact of the cinematic component of the Korean Wave on Chinese cinema. In taking this approach, the authors seek to assess the importance of localized film content for Chinese audiences, as well as canvassing a range of hitherto unknown opinions about ‘Korean’ and ‘Chinese’ styles of storytelling.

East Asian audio-visual collaboration and the global expansion of Chinese media

This article investigates the significant re-orientation of audio-visual production in East Asia over the last few years brought about by the rise of China, beginning with the proposition that unprecedented change is occurring in East Asian media production. While the ‘Sinophone world’ has been the locus of critical analysis in the past, all eyes are now focused on China. Flows of knowledge, expertise and content are becoming significant in this mediascape, yet this dimension has been overlooked by most scholarship in the field. Conceptual and theoretical frameworks based on cross-border consumption of East Asian content require urgent revision. This article shows how media collaborations are changing global media practice and East Asian media flows through a variety of contemporary international collaborations, as well as relevant policy frameworks that impact, positively or negatively, productions by international partners working in film, television and online and mobile video content.

The Chinese–Korean co-production pact: collaborative encounters and the accelerating expansion of Chinese cinema

Official film co-production treaties are designed by policymakers to stimulate a range of collaborations, technology transfers, and joint funding initiatives in the industry. Since July 2004, the Chinese government has used this top-down approach to cultural diplomacy as a symbolic tool for advancing Chinese cinema and opening the domestic market to a host of willing international partners. Korean filmmakers in particular have exploited the (often informal) opportunities presented, engaging in vigorous cooperation with Chinese colleagues across all sectors of the production ecosystem. The continuing flow of Chinese–Korean transnational film encounters, underpinned by influential personal networks, resulted in the signing of a formal China–Korea co-production agreement in July 2014. To examine the efficacy of this policy intervention, this article analyzes the diversity of film collaboration that preceded this agreement and its impact on transnational filmmaking in China. It investigates the strategies used in the remaking of Korean auteur Lee Man Hee’s 1966 melodrama Late Autumn (2010), technical innovation in the VFX-heavy Mr. Go (2013), and the making of mega-distributor CJ E&M’s romance drama A Wedding Invitation (2013) to illustrate how Korean firms and practitioners are expanding the commercial entertainment boundaries of Chinese cinema. In so doing, it also reveals how Chinese film companies are enabling the Korean film industry to internationalize its approach to overseas markets beyond the kind of conspicuous policy initiatives tailored for a globalized cultural economy.

Online opinion leadership in China's digital army: proposals for an empirical study of douban

This paper presents the preliminary findings of an investigation into online opinion leadership using user-generated content from one of the most popular social media digital platforms in China (Douban), where a large army of media-savvy users post and follow comments about films. We first address the problems involved in harvesting huge data samples relating to a number of top-performing South Korean films via an asynchronous scraping crawler. Then, to gain deeper insights into how opinion leaders and followers are making sense of popular cinema, especially exposure to transnational content, the data samples collected are represented using multiple high-level features. Finally, a linear regression model is introduced to analyse the characteristics of opinion leaders. These preliminary results show that the proposed framework is flexible and applicable to social media data for the mining of information relating to online leadership, information which can in turn be used to better inform domestic as well as international producers, distributors and consumers of digital media content.

Cultural Exports, Creative Strategies and Collaborations in the Mainland Chinese Market

The authors examine how Chinese film and television companies have collaborated with their counterparts in South Korea during the past decade. The first part of the chapter challenges the concept of cultural and media ‘flows’, arguing that processes and technologies have probably been more instrumental in transforming the Chinese media industries. Whereas the generic term ‘flows’ applies to finished content, an increase in film co-production and formatting activity in the television industry between the two nations leads us to examine other factors including professional relationships and the exchange of creative ideas and technology. The next section looks at the Chinese government’s ‘going out’ strategy through the 2014 film co-production agreement with South Korea, and the post-production collaboration that followed it. We then examine some examples of television collaboration and how this is helping to raise China’s profile in East Asia, where it is inevitably tarred with the negative image of the Chinese Communist Party. The question that arises is: will such East Asian collaboration efforts enable or impede China’s media dream of reaching out to the world stage?

Chinese transnational cinema and the collaborative tilt toward South Korea

To shed light on the important and growing trend in international filmmaking, this chapter investigates the increasing levels of co-operation in co-productions and post-production work between China and Korea since the mid-2000s, following a surge in personnel exchange and technological transfer. It explains how a range of international relationships and industry connections is contributing to a new ecology of expertise, which in turn is boosting the expansion of China’s domestic market and synergistically transforming the shape and style of Chinese cinema.