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The posts from 2018-2016 are on our archive site: www.softwarestudies.com.

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April 2016

16 April 2016

A View from Above: Exploratory Visualizations of MoMA Photography Collection

  • Radial visualization of 18,941 photographs in the MoMA photography collection. Dates: 1837 - 2012. The distance of a image h from the center is determined by its year of creation; the newer the photograph, the farther it is from the center. The degree of a photograph’s placement in the circle is determined by its average brightness (it increases counterclockwise from 90 degrees).

  • Visualization of 18,941 photographs in the MoMA photography collection. Dates: 1837 - 2012. Images are sorted by year of creation (vertical axis, ascending from top to bottom).

Publication

Nadav Hochman and Lev Manovich. "A View from Above: Exploratory Visualizations of the Thomas Walther Collection," in Mitra Abbaspour, Lee Ann Daffner, and Maria Morris Hambourg, eds. Object:Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection 1909–1949. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2014.

Authors

Nadav Hochman and Lev Manovich, 2013.

Description

The use of quantitative analysis and visualization for the study of cultural visual data allows us to view cultural artifacts in new ways, to confirm and describe more precisely the existing understanding of historical developments, and, potentially, to reveal previously unnoticed patterns. This essay presents visualizations of photographs in the Thomas Walther Collection at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in relation to the greater MoMA photography collection. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that historical patterns in a large photography collection have been analyzed and visualized using quantitative computer techniques.

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Media Species: Creating a Taxonomy of Different Types of Media Content

Full Size Image

View a full size image of the poster on Flickr.

Authors

Lev Manovich, Sergie Magdalin, Tara Zepel, Kedar Reddy, 2009

Description

Media Species is a poster for SIGGRAPH Info-Aesthetics exhibition in 2009.

The project is comparing different types of media (1930's cartoons, song sequences from Bollywood films, contemporary motion graphics and U.S. TV political ads from 2008) using a variety of visualization techniques.

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Timeline: 4535 Time Magazine Covers, 1923-2009

  • Visualization 1. Covers of every issue of Time magazine published from the first issue in 1923 to summer 2009. Click here to view the image on Flickr.

  • Visualization 2. 4535 Time magazine covers are plotted left to right. X axis: Publication date, 1923-2009. Y axis: automatically measured brightness for black and white covers, or saturation for color covers (mean value of all pixels). Click here to view the image on Flickr.

  • Close-up detail of Visualization 1. Click here to view the full size image on Flickr.

  • Close-up detail of Visualization 2. Click here to view the full size image on Flickr.

  • Close-up detail of Visualization 2. Click here to view the full size image on Flickr.

Authors

Lev Manovich and Jeremy Douglass

Full Resolution Visualizations

Description

This project presents a visualization analysis of the Time magazine covers (1923-2009).

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Mondrian vs Rothko: Revealing the Comparative "Footprints" of the Modern Painters

  • Data: 128 paintings by Piet Mondrian (1905 - 1917) and 151 paintings by Mark Rothko (1944 - 1957). Mapping: X-axis: brightness mean, Y-axis: saturation mean. This visualization demonstrates how image plots can be used to compare multiple data sets. In this case, the goal is to compare similar number of paintings by Piet Mondrian and Mark Rothko (produced over comparable time periods of 13 years) along particular visual dimensions. See the full size image on Flickr.

Author

Lev Manovich

Other Visualizations

Description

The visualization (2010) shows 128 paintings by Piet Mondrian (1905-1917) and 123 paintings by Mark Rothko (1938-1953). We have measured selected characteristics (features) of each paintings using image analysis software. In each plot, paintings are organized by average brightness (x-axis) and average saturation (y-axis).

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15 April 2016

On Broadway: Representing Life in the 21st Century City through Social Media Images and Data

  • Screenshot of the interactive installation On Broadway.

  • Interactive installation On Broadway in the exhibition You Are Here NYC: Art, Information, and Mapping, The Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York City, September 22 – November 15, 2017. Photo: Lev Manovich.

  • Lev Manovich presents the interactive installation On Broadway at the opening of Data Drift, curated by Lev Manovich, Rasa Smite, and Raitis Smits, Riga, Latvia, October 8 – November 22, 2015. View more photos from the exhibition opening on Flickr. See the installation shots on Flickr.

  • Interactive installation On Broadway in the exhibition Data Drift, curated by Lev Manovich, Rasa Smite, and Raitis Smits, Riga, Latvia, October 8 – November 22, 2015. View more photos from the exhibition opening on Flickr. See the installation shots on Flickr.

  • Interactive installation On Broadway in the exhibition Data Drift, curated by Lev Manovich, Rasa Smite, and Raitis Smits, Riga, Latvia, October 8 – November 22, 2015. View more photos from the exhibition opening on Flickr. See the installation shots on Flickr.

  • Interactive installation On Broadway in the exhibition Public Eye: 175 Years of Sharing Photography, New York Public Library (NYPL), December 13, 2014 - January 3, 2016.

Website

http://on-broadway.nyc

Authors

  • Artists: Daniel Goddemeyer, Moritz Stefaner, Dominikus Baur, Lev Manovich.
  • Contributors: Software Studies Initiative (Mehrdad Yazdani, Jay Chow), Brynn Shepherd and Leah Meisterlin, and PhD students at The Graduate Center, City University of New York (Agustin Indaco, Michelle Morales, Emanuel Moss, and Alise Tifentale).

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06 April 2016

Google Logo Space

  • Google Logo Space. Click here to see full 9000 x 6750 version on Flickr.

  • Close-up: small variations (the right part of the visualization).

  • Close-up: medium variations (the center part of the visualization).

  • Close-up: extreme variations (the left part of the visualization).

Images

Author

Jeremy Douglass

Description

Every day billions of people see a new logo appear on Google’s homepage. Since 1998 these logo variations have explored an ever-growing range of design possibilities while still retaining the “essence” of the original logo.

Our visualization of 587 logos shows the space of these variations.

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05 April 2016

Phototrails: Visualizing 2.3 M Instagram photos from 13 global cities

  • Detail of visualization of 53,498 photos shared in Tokyo taken between 18 and 25 February 2012. Photos are sorted by upload date and time (top to bottom, left to right). Click here for a full size high resolution image.

  • 50,000 Instagram photos from New York City, organized by brightness mean (perimeter) and hue mean (radius). Detail. Click here for a full size high resolution image.

  • 50,000 Instagram photos from Bangkok, organized by hue median (perimeter) and brightness mean (radius). Detail. Click here for a full size high resolution image.

Website

http://phototrails.info/

Authors

Nadav Hochman, Lev Manovich, and Jay Chow.

Publication

Nadav Hochman and Lev Manovich. Zooming into an Instagram City: Reading the local through social media. Feature article, First Monday, July 2013.

Description

What do millions of Instagram photographs tell us about the world?

How can we see larger cultural patterns contained in such massive visual social data?

Do these images reflect the specificity of local places?

A group of researchers from the Art History department at the University of Pittsburgh, the Software Studies Initiative at California Institute for Telecommunication and Information and the Computer Science program at The Graduate Center, City University of New York collaborated to investigate these questions.

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