[Commlist] New Book: Cultural Analytics

We are pleased to announce the release of Lev Manovich’s new book 
Cultural Analytics, published by The MIT Press 
(http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/cultural-analytics 
<http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/cultural-analytics>). The book 
is available in hardback or as an e-book.

How can we see a billion images? In Cultural Analytics, Lev Manovich 
presents the principles and methods required to computationally analyze 
contemporary culture on a massive scale. One of the book's innovations 
is showing how these methods can be applied to visual media.

Lev Manovich (http://manovich.net/index.php/about 
<http://manovich.net/index.php/about>) is a Presidential Professor at 
City University of New York (CUNY), and director of the Cultural 
Analytics Lab. Based on 13 years of research in this lab, Cultural 
Analytics is his fifteenth book.


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Description of Cultural Analytics:

How can we see a billion images? What analytical methods can we bring to 
bear on the astonishing scale of digital culture—the terabytes 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, with a particular focus on visual media. Drawing on more than a 
decade of research and projects from his own lab, Manovich—the founder 
of the field of cultural analytics—offers a gentle, nontechnical 
introduction to selected key concepts of data science and discusses the 
ways that our society uses data and algorithms.

Manovich offers examples of computational cultural analysis and 
discusses the shift from “new media” to “more media”; explains how to 
turn cultural processes into computational data; and introduces concepts 
for exploring cultural datasets using data visualization as well as 
other recently developed methods for analyzing image and video datasets. 
He considers both the possibilities and the limitations of computational 
methods, and how using them challenges our existing ideas about culture 
and how to study it.

Cultural Analytics is a book of media theory. Arguing that before we can 
theorize digital culture, we need to see it, and that, because of its 
scale, to see it we need computers, Manovich provides scholars with 
practical tools for studying contemporary media.

Endorsements:

“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

“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 at Ludwig Maximilian 
University of Munich

Table of Contents:

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


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