Archive for October 2020

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[Commlist] New Book: Cultural Analytics

Wed Oct 21 21:49:25 GMT 2020




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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