The tool

The Open Children's Media Index is built with the Children's Media Analysis Toolkit (CMAT), an open-source desktop application for analyzing the sensory load of video content.

CMAT is a Windows desktop application that analyzes MP4 episodes of television shows and produces a sensory-load profile for each episode and a cumulative profile for an entire show. It measures formal and structural features of video — pacing, color, motion, audio — and does not issue a verdict on appropriateness. Every composite score shows its component parts.

Source code, installation instructions, and full documentation:
github.com/SamuelBabbertResearch/childrens-media-analysis-toolkit

How data enters this index

1. Video files are analyzed locally using CMAT with the parameters documented in Methodology.
2. Results are reviewed manually before publication. No data is published automatically.
3. The site is regenerated from the reviewed cache and pushed to GitHub Pages.

This manual review step is intentional. It ensures that no erroneously analyzed, mislabeled, or otherwise inappropriate content reaches the public index.

Reproducing the analysis

1. Install CMAT from the GitHub repository above.
2. Obtain the same source video files.
3. Run analysis with the parameters documented in Methodology.

Per-episode JSON results and show-level aggregate CSVs are available on the Download data page.