Show HN: A map of historical movies by narrative location and time period

Show HN: A map of historical movies by narrative location and time period(historical-moviemap.inneuro.ai)

7 points by Ldorigo 207 days ago | 6 comments

A year ago I watched The Count of Monte Cristo, got curious about post-revolution France, and wondered which other movies depicted France in the same period.

I was disappointed to find no easy way to answer that question - the only information of this kind I could find was scattered on Wikipedia, unstructured and hard to find.

I thought that this would be a perfect use for LLMs. One year and a lot of tinkering later I'm proud to present to you the results - hoping you'll find it as entertaining as I do to wade through time, geography, and stories.

(P.S.: If you find me a more creative, evocative name I will instantly change the domain name and credit you for it :-) )

jorgen123 207 days ago |

It is an interesting idea.

For me, somewhat older with iffy eyesight it is hard to use. The fonts are really small. The map could use more real estate on the screen. Right now it sits inside a container that only uses a portion of the screen.

What is confusing is why I see science fiction movies depicting recent history periods but not movies made in the period this SF movies claim to show. E.g. why include Resident Evil on Alcatraz island, but not Dirty Harry (the 2nd)? Time period movies such as Dirty Harry are precious time capsules of what San Francisco and Marin looked like at the time.

Ldorigo 207 days ago | |

Thanks a lot for the usability feedback! I'm trying to improve it based on this and a few other early comments.

Regarding your question, one limitation I'm aware of is that my data consists mainly of movies _made as historical movies_, not movies that just happen to be set in the contemporary period of when the movie came out. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an easy way to identify this latter type of movies based only on wikipedia metadata/categories; so the only way I can think of would be to process _all_ movies on wikipedia and infer whether they are in a contemporary setting... but that's prohibitively expensive. I'll think about it more.

ahazred8ta 207 days ago |

You might get more traction on reddit's r/Movies, r/History_Maps, r/AskHistory, /r/HistoryTeachers, and /r/TeachingResources https://reddit.com/r/History_Maps/

Ldorigo 207 days ago | |

Thank you! I'm fixing some early feedback about the UX and I'll do just that!

marysminefnuf 207 days ago |

This is sick!!! Would love to see old movies that take place in multiple countries. My wife marys family comes from iraq so if there were obscure movies that took place across borders that would be really cool to look that.

Ldorigo 207 days ago | |

Thanks! You mean to be able to search for movies that occurred in a specific set of locations? That's a really cool idea, I hadn't thought about it. The data is there already; it's just not searchable in that way. I might give it a go next week. I need to think of a nice UX for it.