The Mapping LAWS project has released an interface developed by Dr Geoff Ford (Postdoctoral Fellow on the Mapping LAWS project / Lecturer in Digital Humanities) to experience and explore representations of robots in film.
Robot Dreams features robotic voices narrating excerpts of movie plots featuring robots.
As the robotic voices speak each sentence a visualisation of possible related themes appears.
The visualisation highlights the prevalence of themes related to war, violence and threat, however it also allows researchers and academics to explore other recurring features of robots in popular culture.
Over 1800 excerpts have been extracted from 82,000 movie plots on Wikipedia and it takes over four hours to watch and listen to the entire sequence.
It has been released as a playful and engaging way for researchers and the public to think about the role of robots in popular culture.
Geoff has written an accompanying article discussing how Robot Dreams was built, some of the key ideas behind it and how it fits into the ongoing research of the Mapping LAWS project team.
