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.netBook 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.
