[I wrote the below last August but never posted it. Now, seeing the depiction of movie color palettes at moviebarcode, I’ve relented.]
The Speech Analysis and Interpretation Lab (SAIL) at the USC engineering school has an Emotions Research Group which might make my dreams come true: the automated analysis of television dramas for the sake of determining their use of emotional tones (recurring, exceptional, sequencing, etc.)
It would be fun, and possibly instructive, to thus compare the “x-rayed” emotional core of various dramas, from Oscar-winning foreign films through the ages to the telenovelas produced by various nations.
[This is where I go “off-road” and pick on the Japanese for their love of robots and distrust of immigrants.]
SAIL doesn’t know it wants to make my dream come true but they — or a similar group — will need to do so in order to teach computers to enjoy TV.
Because If computers don’t learn how to love TV, the elderly in Japan will never get their TV-watching buddies. (Though I suppose such automatons could simply synch up with an emotion-track. Sigh. Another dream dashed to pieces.)