Rashomon

Spy magazine in the 1990s had a witty essay on how, in American journalism, it only took a couple of slightly conflicting accounts of the same event for someone to trot out the word “Rashômon”. Here is an opportunity to revisit Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film, and to appreciate how the cliche does not do justice to a uniquely disturbing drama.Rashômon is about a court proceeding, recalled in flashback, relating to a mysterious crime. A bandit, Tajômaru (Toshirô Mifune) is on trial for murdering a samurai (Mayasuki Mori) and…

Screenshot: GizmodoThe film that kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe and subsequently launched a million takes about comic book movies destroying cinema is getting a little respect. On Wednesday, the Library of Congress announced the 25 movies that will be added to National Film Registry and Iron Man has been chosen as ahistorically significant work of American filmmaking. This year’s entries to the prestigious list of films join old-school classics like The Great Train Robbery and Citizen Kane as well as more…

Photo by Peter Olexa on UnsplashReadings in computational social scienceThis article comments on three papers associated with computational social science research: (1) Do Cascades Recur? (Cheng et al., 2016); (2) Integrating Text and Image: Determining Multimodal Document Intent in Instagram Posts (Kruk et al., 2019); and (3) Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures (Breiman, 2001); these papers focus on (1) recurrence in content sharing on social media (here, Facebook); (2) the use of multimodal data (image–caption pairs)…