"Cultural Analytics" book published by The MIT Press - October 2020

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  The cover of Lev Manovich's Cultural Analytics book (The MIT Press, 2020.)

This new book by Lev Manovich brings together his insights from running the Cultural Analytics lab since 2007, directing over 40 cultural data projects, and teaching practical courses in data visualization, data science, and digital culture for many years.

More information

Book page on manovich.net

Book summary

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. 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 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.

"AI Aesthetics," new book by Lev Manovich

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  Lev Manovich. AI Aesthetics. Moscow: Strelka Press, 2018.

AI plays a crucial role in global cultural ecosystem. It recommends what we should see, listen to, read, and buy. It determines how many people will see our shared content. It helps us make aesthetic decisions when we create media. In professional cultural production, AI has already been adopted to produce movie trailers, music albums, fashion items, product and web designs, architecture, etc.

In the new book AI Aesthetics (2018), Lev Manovich offers a systematic framework to help us think about the cultural uses of AI today and in the future. He challenges existing ideas and gives us new concepts for understanding media, design, and aesthetics in the AI era.