Plotting film toponyms: A study in cultural geo-analytics

Films are deeply geographical. Externally, they are produced in places, across increasingly complex and shifting global networks that connect organisations, cities, professionals, and equipment. Internally, their imagined geographies are set in either real or fictional places, and refer to their social, political, and cultural facets. In this study, we adopt a cultural analytics approach to commence an investigation of the spatial dimension of films, focussing on toponyms in film plots. Using geoparsing, we extract toponyms from about 42,000 film plots from Wikipedia and we analyse their spatial distribution by country. We then consider the relationship between a film’s country of origin and the plot toponyms, charting the flows from places where films are produced to the geographies evoked in their stories.