Graduate Center building in New York (5th Avenue and 34th street). Photo by Alex Irklievski.
The Graduate Center, City University of New York, co-leader of CUNY's newly created Big Data Consortium, announced that it will establish the CUNY Center for Digital Scholarship and Data Visualization. The consortium has been awarded $15 million from the State of New York in the CUNY 2020 grant competition.
See full Press Release for more details.
The Center will build on two already research directions at CUNY. One is digital humanities research, including a number of innovative projects by a number of faculty and students. The prominent examples of such projects are Professor's Matthew Gold Commons In a Box, hybrid print/digital publication Debates in Digital Humanities. For the full list of people, projects and labs see GC Digital Initiatives web site.
The second direction is the work on visualizing large cultural data sets headed by Professor
Lev Manovich. Manovich joined CUNY as The Professor in the Ph.D. Program in Computer Science in 2013. Manovich's lab (Software Studies Initiative, softwarestudies.com) has been based in California Institute for Telecommunication and Information (Calit2) since 2007 and now operates between San Diego and NYC. The lab a pioneer of theory and practice of cultural analytics, applying computational and visualization methods to massive sets of visual cultural data. (Manovich first proposed the idea of cultural analytics in 2005.)
The Center plans to analyze and visualize datasets from leading New York City and national cultural institutions. The institutions who already expressed interests in working with the Center are the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the New York Historical Society, the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Digital Public Library of America, and Rhizome at the New Museum.
Software Studies Initiative will continue to operate as the independent lab, drawing on the unique resources of Calit2 and CUNY. We are looking forward to participating in the work of the new Center and sharing our experience and tools.
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