Cultural Analytics

by Lev Manovich

Overview

A book at the intersection of data science and media studies, presenting concepts and methods for computational analysis of cultural data.

How can we see a billion images? What analytical methods can we bring to bear on the astonishing scale of digital culture--the billions of photographs shared on social media every day, the hundreds of millions of songs created by twenty million musicians on Soundcloud, the content of four billion Pinterest boards? In Cultural Analytics, Lev Manovich presents concepts and methods for computational analysis of cultural data. Drawing on more than a decade of research and projects from his own lab, Manovich offers a gentle, nontechnical introduction to the core ideas of data analytics and discusses the ways that our society uses data and algorithms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262360630
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	10/20/2020
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Lev Manovich is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The Language of New Media (MIT Press), hailed as "the most suggestive and broad-ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan," and other books.

Table of Contents

Introduction: How to See One Billion Images?
Part 1: Studying Culture at Scale
Chapter 1: From New Media to More Media
Chapter 2: The Science of Culture?
Chapter 3: Culture Industry and Media Analytics
Part 2: Representing Culture as Data
Chapter 4: Types of Cultural Data
Chapter 5: Cultural Sampling
Chapter 6: Metadata and Features
Chapter 7: Language, Categories, and Senses
Part 3: Exploring Cultural Data
Chapter 8: Information Visualization
Chapter 9: Exploratory Media Analysis
Chapter 10: Methods of Media Visualization
Conclusion: Can We Think Without Categories?

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Cultural Analytics causes an inspirational mind-shift for the study of culture. Providing key terms and an easy-to-follow non-technical explanation of how to deal with cultural data, it outlines new paradigms in the analysis of data, creation of media visualizations, and eventually the study of culture. Lev Manovich, as always, is leading the way to understanding digital culture.”
— Harald Klinke, Assistant Professor of Art History, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; editor of International Journal for Digital Art History
 
“This is a timely, forward-looking book. It introduces computational algorithms as methods to decode the intricacies of culture. Culture is data waiting to be translated into meaningful patterns by visualization.”
— Manuel Lima, founder of VisualComplexity.com; author of The Book of Circles
 
“Manovich provides a much-needed exploration of how our growing digital world relates to the real one, and how data reflects more than just quantitative insights.”
— Nathan Yau, founder of FlowingData
 
“Data is fundamentally reshaping the way we create, consume, analyze and visualize content, reshaping our understanding of culture. Manovich, a leading theorist at the intersection of data, arts, and media studies, offers a smart and comprehensive overview of this rapidly changing landscape, documenting the emergence of cultural analytics as a new mode of inquiry.”
— Albert-László Barabási, Professor of Network Science at Northeastern University; author of Formula and Linked