How to compare one million images? Visualizing patterns in art, games, comics, cinema, web, print, and user-generated content

A lecture by Lev MANOVICH at the medialab invitation

The explosive growth of cultural content on the web including social media, and the digitization by museums, libraries, and other agencies opened up fundamentally new possibilities for the studies of both contemporary and historical cultures.

But how do we navigate massive visual collections of user-generated content which may contain billions of images? What new theoretical concepts do we need to deal with the new scale of born-digital culture? How do we use data mining of massive cultural data sets to question everything we know about culture?

In 2007  Software Studies Initiative have been established at University of California, San Diego to begin working on these questions. Lev MANOVICH will show a number of projects highlighting how visualization allows us to see patterns in cultural data which were not visible before.

The examples include analysis of art, photography, film, animation, motion graphics, video games, magazines, and other visual media, including 1 million pages of manga (Japanese comics) pages and 1 million images from deviantArt (largest social network for non-professional art).

 

Lev MANOVICH is a Professor at the Visual Arts Department, University of California – San Diego (UCSD) where he teaches courses in digital art, history and theory of digital culture, and digital humanities. He also directs Software Studies Initiative at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. (CALIT2).

Manovich is the author of Software Takes Command (Olivares: Milan; English version released under CC license, 2008), Black Box – White Cube (Merve Verlag Berlin, 2005), Soft Cinema DVD (The MIT Press, 2005), The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001), Metamediji (Belgrade, 2001), Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture (Chicago University Press, 1993) as well as over 100 articles which have been published in 30 countries and reprinted over 400 times.