Cultural Analytics
The explosive growth of cultural content on the web including social media since 2004 and the digitization efforts by museums, libraries, and companies since the 1990s make possible fundamentally new paradigm for the study of both contemporary and historical cultures. We can use computer-based techniques for quantitative analysis and interactive visualization already commonly employed in sciences to begin analyzing patterns in massive cultural data sets. To make an analogy with "visual analytics," "business analytics," and "web analytics," we call this new paradigm cultural analytics.
We believe that a systematic use of large-scale computational analysis and interactive visualization of cultural data sets and data streams will become a major trend in cultural criticism and culture industries in the coming decades. What will happen when humanists start using interactive visualizations as a standard tool in their work, the way many scientists do already? If slides made possible art history, and if a movie projector and video recorder enabled film studies, what new cultural disciplines may emerge out of the use of interactive visualization and data analysis of large cultural data sets?
The idea of Cultural Analytics was first presented by Lev Manovich in 2005. Software Studies Initiative founded at Calit2 in 2007 made possible to turn this vision into a research program. By drawing on the cutting-edge cyberinfrastructure and visualization research at Calit2 as well as world reputation of UCSD in digital arts and theory, we are able to develop a unique research agenda which complements other projects in digital humanities and "cyberscholarship":
- while most projects in digital humanities deal with text, we focus on automatic analysis of visual and media cultures and artifacts: video games, visual art, media design, cinema, animation, AMV, machinema, photography, etc.;
- in developing techniques particularly suited for cultural visualization, we draw both from visualization fields (information visualization, scientific visualization, visual analytics) and from media and digital art;
- we are also developing techniques for analysis and visualization of born digital content such as video games, web sites and social media.
Case studies and visualizations:
cultural analytics projects (currently being updated)
our visualizations on Flickr
White papers:
Lev Manovich (with contribution by Noah Wardrip-Fruin). Cultural Analytics: white paper (5/2007; latest update 11/2008): [doc 2.4 MB]
Articles:
Lev Manovich. "How to Follow Global Digital Cultures, or Cultural Analytics for Beginners." Deep Search, ed. Felix Stalder and Konrad Becker. Transaction Publishers ( English version) and Studienverlag (German version), 2009. [ doc 92 KB]
So Yamaoka, Lev Manovich, Jeremy Douglass, Falko Kuester. "Cultural Analytics on Ultra High-Resolution Displays." Paper submitted to ACM Multimedia 2009 conference.
Lev Manovich and Jeremy Douglass. "Visualizing Change." Forthcoming in Visualising the 21st Century, ed. Oliver Grau. MIT Press. [pdf 5 MB]
