This project was made with the course "Methods in Quantitative Sociology" of Paris Saclay University (Level M2).
If we look at the art history, we observe that the aesthetic criteria changed a lot. For example, jazz knew a legitimation process. It's considered to be a style associated with an educated public and benefits enjoys a certain prestige, whereas it was considered as a marginal and deviant musical style in the 1960s. This process was due to the expansion of public cultural policies during the 1980s and also the teaching of this musical style. This process was completed by a relative eclecticism of superior classes.
The object of this work is to establish an evolution of the norm of legitimacy in cinema. Therefore, I will provide an analysis of Telerama's Reviews, because Telerama has the aim to be a vector of norm. By descriptive statistics, we establish that the reviews are recent and drama are over-represented.
To analyze discourses, I run a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to identify some topics. I chose 30 topics because it was the optimal number, looking to semantic coherence and exclusivity. Then, I put together the topics in more general categories to make easier the interpretation : comedy, social issues, family, USA, fiction styles, adaptation and woman.
The evolution through times seems linked to the fact that the publication of critics is recent.
Of course, this model has some limits. Firstly, LDA the model shows the world that appears the most: but with the scarcity of each word, it can give importance to a minor word. Moreover, the model creates topics in each case, so it can wrongly confirm our hypothesis. In the specific case of this model, the dependence on cinematographic genre in the vocabulary used can hide some effects.
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