70+ years of data on Network television. Attributes of shows, race & gender of cast members, directors, producers, presenters, etc.
Using data on TV schedules and metadata on TV programs from Wikipedia, we explore the popularity of different genres of shows over time, and the race and gender composition of directors, producers, creators, presenters, cast members, music composers, etc.
A small preview of what we find:
The percentage of shows that are on crime has gone from 0 to about 10% over the last 70 years.
The percentage of black cast members, presenters, directors, and producers has remained less than 5%, scraping 0 some years. Trends for gender are slightly more hopeful. The percentage of female cast members has risen from around 30% to about 40% in recent years. The percentage of female directors has risen at a steady clip from 0 to about 10%, while the most pleasing trend has been among female producers, which has risen from 0 to about 35%.
The rest of the document is arranged as follows:
For running the Python scripts at your end, see the readme
Get the data
Parse and Augment the data
Analyze the data
Data are from TV Schedules Data on Wikipedia and gray boxes (informational boxes on the right-hand side of Wikipedia pages of TV programs)
US TV Schedules plus info. from the gray box of the program
(Augmented) Names of people on TV with crosswalk to TV schedules
Further Augmented Names File with Imputations of Race and Gender from R
Tables
A Few Graphs:
Gaurav Sood and Suriyan Laohaprapanon
Released under CC BY 2.0.
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