What can we learn about the societies from analyzing and visualizing billions of photographs and video shared on social networks? Can we use visualization to explore massive visual data sets without using predefined research questions? Can we analyze big data without using numbers? In this presentation, Dr. Manovich will discuss these questions using examples of recent projects from his lab where they analyze 2.3 million Instagram photos from 13 global cities, compare Instagram selfies, and create an interactive visualization of a city life that does not use any maps.
About Speaker: Lev Manovich, a world-renowned innovator in digital humanities and theorist of digital culture and media art, joined the Graduate Center’s doctoral faculty in January 2013 to lead digital humanities research. Manovich’s global reputation in digital humanities stems from the tremendous impact of his 2001 book, The Language of New Media, which has been translated into eight languages. One reviewer, William Warner of University of California–Santa Barbara, called the book “the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.” His next book, Software Takes Command, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Publishing (July 2013).
Manovich’s innovative leadership in digital humanities is also playing a key role in the development of a new field of software studies – the study of how software shapes contemporary societies. In 2007, he founded the Software Studies Initiative (SSI) at UC–San Diego’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Manovich’s research, which is housed at the Graduate Center, focuses on cultural analytics using computational and visualization techniques to analyze massive cultural data sets and flows. The techniques developed in his lab can be used in digital humanities, art history, cinema studies, game studies, media studies, ethnography, exhibition design, and other fields.
Manovich holds a Ph.D. in visual and cultural studies from the University of Rochester. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Digital Cultures Fellowship from UC–Santa Barbara; a fellowship from the Zentrum für Literaturforschung, Berlin; and a Mellon Fellowship from California Institute for the Arts.
