Software Studies

new book by Lev Manovich is coming out on July 4: press release and publication details

2013-06-05T08:07:00.000-04:00

Book web page: www.manovich.net/softbook

Twitter: #softbook

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Wednesday, June 5, 2013
CONTACT: Katy Otto, 240.478.9387 or katyotto@gmail.com

New Media Expert Lev Manovich Announces Releases First Book Offering a Detailed Analysis of Software We Use Daily

New Book, Software Takes Command, To Come Out July 4

New York, NY – Lev Manovich, acclaimed new media expert and Professor of Computer Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, will release his latest work Software Takes Command on July 4, 2013.

Published by Bloomsbury Academic, this new book from the celebrated author of The Language of New Media is the first to offer a rigorous analysis of the technology we all use daily - software for media authoring, access, and sharing. What motivated developers in the 1960s and ‘70s to create the concepts and techniques that now underlie contemporary applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Final Cut? How do these tools shape the visual aesthetics of contemporary media and design? What happens to the idea of a “medium” after previously media-specific tools have been simulated and extended into software? Does “media” still exist?Lev Manovich answers these questions through detailed analysis of key media applications such as Photoshop and After Effects, popular web services such as Google Earth, and milestone projects in design, motion graphics, and interactive environments. Software Takes Command is a must for technologists, designers, artists and researchers concerned with contemporary media and digital culture.

In addition to soft cover, hard cover, and e-book, the complete book will be available as free download under Creative Commons License.

For media inquiries, including interview requests and review copies, contact Katy Otto at (240) 478-9387 or katyotto@gmail.com.

For speaking inquiries, contact Miki Oda at miki.oda2@gmail.com

Endorsements of Software Takes Command:

"Computers haven't transformed media--they've shattered the very idea of a medium. Lev Manovich connects the dots of software society, from layers in Photoshop to layers of data, interpretation, and meaning.” Martin Wattenberg, Software Artist and Scientist.

"Lev Manovich is the only media theorist around who is talking not just about what computers do but how they do it. In search of mass media’s “Velvet Revolution,” Manovich peers behind the black curtain of software. There he discovers the hybrid languages and slippery workflows that drive today’s ubiquitous mix of animation, typography, design, and live action." Ellen Lupton, Curator of Contemporary Design, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

"Through a theoretical analysis of the computer as cultural metamedium and a probing history of 'media software' such Photoshop and After Effects, among others, this is essential reading for anyone interested in how software has changed how we work, create, and perceive the world." Tanya Clement, Assistant Professor, School of Information at the University of Texas, Austin.

"This long-researched book, which synthesizes critical theory, human-computer interaction, and media history as well as newer approaches from the digital humanities, allows software to take its place as a commanding element in our conversations about computers, and how we work, play, learn, and create." Matthew Kirschenbaum, Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland.

ISBN numbers:

Hardcover: 9781623568177
Softcover: 9781623567453
ePub: 9781623562618

Lev Manovich is Professor of Computer Science at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, Director of the Software Studies Initiative (www.softwarestudies.com) at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, and Visiting Professor at European Graduate School. His earlier book The Language of New Media was described as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." Read more about Lev and his work at www.manovich.net or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/manovich. For more on Software Takes Command, visit www.manovich.net/softbook.

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We are hiring: Visual Designers (web design/data visualization/print ) for softwarestudies.com (freelance position)

2013-05-30T09:48:00.005-04:00

Software Studies Initiative wants to hire Visual Designer or Design Team (web design, info visualization, print)

Our lab (softwarestudies.com) works on using visualization and computational data analysis to explore massive cultural visual data.

Here are examples of our projects.

And here is the description of our vision for analyzing and visualizing big cultural data (aka cultural analytics).

We want to establish a long term relationship with a talented and versatile designer or design studio in NYC to work on visual design of our new projects during the next few years, new data visualizations, and a book presenting the projects.

The ideal designer/studio will be interested in contributing to the content of our work (exploration of massive cultural data sets using visualization and design), and possible involvement as a co-author on the projects. The designer(s) will receive full credit for all their contributions, and will be paid using industry-level rates for all their work with us.

The position is freelance. We don't require fixed number of hours - this depends on your availability.

We like to work face to face, and therefore we are looking for a NYC based designer/studio. However, if you have great skills and talent, we will consider working with designer(s) located anywhere else on the planet.

SKILLS

The designer/studio will work on web design, information design, data visualization, and print design for our projects. However, if you are great only in some of these areas, we also want to talk to you.

RESPONSIBILITIES

1| Web design:

Improve the design of softwarestudies.com and manovich.net, making them more visual.

Creation of a new portfolio web site to feature our selected "best" projects (both past projects and new ones we will be designing with you).

Visual design of all projects for the new portfolio site. This may also include new data visualizations of our data sets, animations, videos, etc.) In addition to new projects, the site will also feature some of the our older projects - which need to be moved from their present format (blog posts or single web pages) to a visually sophisticated level, compatible with designs for new projects. Examples: One million manga pages; Mondrian vs Rothko: footprints and evolution in style space.

All web designs should uses contemporary web technologies (including responsive/adaptive design), and feature social media integration.

2| Data visualization:

Create information and data visualizations of our selected cultural data sets (from small to very big) to be featured as part of projects presentations on the new portfolio site, and in the new book (see below).

3| Book design:

Design a new full-color very visual book (print) by Lev Manovich. The book will feature texts based on our publications about "cultural analytics" and a comprehensive portfolio of our visualization projects. You will need to develop a visual language for presentation of visualizations of cultural data sets and their organization strategy (for example, organizing them by scale, type of media, etc.)

Ideally, the same visual language developed for presentation of individual projects on the web (see 1) will be used in the book.

START TIME

The position can start immediately.

SALARY

We will pay competitive industry rates. The level of pay will depend on your experience, visibility in design/data visualization fields, and the ability to create compelling cutting-edge work.

TO APPLY

Please send email to: manovich {dot} lev {at} gmail {dot} com.

Include the following:

-link to your portfolio web site;
-your desired rates (per hour, task or a project);
-your availability (how many hours per week / month you can work with us).

Use "design applicant for Software Studies Initiative" in the header of the email.
(Any other emails will not be open, so please make sure to use this line exactly.)

APPLICATIONS REVIEW

Will start immediately. We are hoping to make a decision by middle of June.

posted: May 30, 2013, 9:47am, EST.

Conference on Digital Humanities in St. Petesburg, Russia, October 3-5, 2013

2013-05-27T10:39:00.001-04:00

CULTURAL RESEARCH IN THE CONTEXT OF «DIGITAL HUMANITIES»

International Conference (working languages: English and Russian)

Place: Saint-Petersburg, Russia

Dates: October 3-5, 2013

Organized by: Russian State Herzen University www.herzendigitalhumanities.ru

Detailed information about the conference, and how to submit papers.

A review / class adoption PDF of "Software Takes Command" is available

2013-05-05T09:42:00.000-04:00

My new book Software Takes Command will be published in July 2013 by Bloomsbury Academic. It will be available as softcover, e-book, and free PDF under Creative Commons license.

If you are interested in writing a review of the book, email Tanya.Leet@bloomsbury.com to get the advanced copy (cc: me).

If you are interested to consider the book for your future class, email mathew.nichols@bloomsbury.com to get the examination copy (cc: me), or follow the steps described here:

http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/academic/exam-copies/#EbookExamCopies

(If you don't get any response, please email me directly at manovich dot lev at gmail dot com. Put the following in email header: "Software Takes Command - review copy" or "Software Takes Command - examination copy" in the header.)

Amazon.com book page (pre-order now - the book will be published on July 4th):

http://www.amazon.com/Software-Command-International-Critical-Aesthetics/dp/1623567459/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1368738110&sr=8-2&keywords=manovich

Book page on softwarestudies.com:

http://lab.softwarestudies.com/p/softbook.html

Book info on Bloomsbury Academic site:

http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/software-takes-command-9781623567453/

Open Data Fellowship - summer position in NYC

2013-05-02T14:02:00.001-04:00

Open Data Fellowship

Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO), in partnership with the OpenGLAM initiative, Open Knowledge Foundation, and Wikimedia NYC, is now accepting applications for an Open Data Fellowship for Summer 2013. This paid, 8-week fellowship will serve two roles:

• Wikipedian-in-Residence for member institutions in the METRO consortium
• Facilitator for institutions interested in pursuing broader open data initiatives

METRO is a non-profit consortium of over 250 libraries, archives, museums, cultural heritage institutions, and non-profits in New York City. The fellowship position will also collaborate with OpenGLAM, OKF, and Wikimedia NYC as part of their work.

Position Details:

Wikipedian-in-Residence role:

• Assist METRO membership in their understanding and use of Wikipedia
• Provide training and guidance on Wikipedia/Wikimedia use and WikiProjects
• Assist membership with releasing collection content into Wikimedia (or other) Commons
• Organize and host at least one Wikimedia-related special event or workshop

Open Data role:

• Assist membership with open data initiatives, including tools, platforms, and licensing
• Develop guides and manuals for data export, management, public release
• Contribute to an emerging multi-institutional linked open data project as needed

Fellow is expected to document their experience through METRO, OpenGLAM, GLAM-Wiki, or other community channels.

Position Requirements:

• Must have experience creating or editing Wikipedia content, contributing to Wikimedia (or other) Commons, and/or using other open data platforms
• Student (graduate or undergrad) preferred, but any qualified candidates will be considered
• Experience working in GLAMs or other cultural heritage institutions is preferred
• Some experience in user training or creating instructional resources is preferred
• Must be a US citizen

About the Position:
• Stipend: $5000 for a full-time, 8-week term working a 35-hour week
• Position Term: 8 weeks, start and end date flexible, but primarily during summer
• Located: At METRO (57 E. 11th St. NYC); some possible work at member organizations (within New York City’s five boroughs and Westchester county)

How to Apply:
Submit a cover letter (including your Wikipedia experience, username, and other skills you bring to the position) along with your resume and two references along with their contact information. Email the above in PDF format to info@metro.org. Applications accepted through May 15, 2013. Questions may be directed to Jefferson Bailey, jbailey@metro.org.

View the job listing at: http://metro.org/articles/open-data-fellowship-accepting-applications/

Visualizing Image & Video Collections workshop by Lev Manovich, The Graduate Center CUNY, April 24, 2013

2013-04-24T08:45:00.000-04:00

Examples of visualizations created with the tooks shown in the workshop:

Visualizing image and video collections: Examples from Lev Manovich

Visualizing Image & Video Collections workshop

instructor:
Lev Manovich, Professor (digital humanities and computers science), The Graduate Center CUNY

data/time:
Wednesday, April 24th 2013. 6:00-9:00pm

location: Room 6418, The Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, New York.

This workshop will cover recently developed visualization techniques for exploring image and video collections of any size – from a few dozens to millions of images. We will use open source free ImageJ software with the custom tools developed in Lev Manovich’s lab (softwarestudies.com). The techniques have already been used in variety of fields, including art history, film and media studies, digital culture studies, game studies, and linguistics. The participants will also be introduced to digital image processing – the use of computers to automatically analyze images.

Note: For students who wish to bring their own computers to the workshop, ImageJ runs on Macs, PCs and Lunix.
Download link: http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/download.html

Sample data sets to be used in workshops - download link (Dropbox folder)

Separate links to our ImageJ visualization macros (included in the sample data set download):

ImagePlot

ImageMontage

ImageSlice

Documentation:

GUIDE TO VISUALIZING VIDEO AND IMAGE SEQUENCES | How to prepare images and video collections for visualization; use of ImageJ built-in commands and our custom plug-ins.

ImagePlot user guide

Theory and methodology articles about visualizing image and video collection from softwarestudies.com

IEEE BIGDATA 2013: WORKSHOP ON BIG HUMANITIES

2013-04-22T08:00:00.002-04:00

The Workshop on Big Humanities will be held in conjunction with the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2013, 6-9 October 2013, San Francisco, California). The conference provides a leading international forum for disseminating the latest research in the growing field of “big data”.

The workshop will address applications of “big data” in the humanities, arts and culture, and the challenges and possibilities that such increased scale brings for scholarship in these areas.

Topics covered by the workshop include, but are not restricted to, the following:

Text- and data-mining of historical and archival material.
Social media analysis, including sentiment analysis
Cultural analytics
Crowd-sourcing and big data
Cyber-infrastructures for the humanities
Relationship between ‘small data’ and big data
NoSQL databases and their application, e.g. document and graph databases
Big data and the construction of memory and identity
Big data and archival practice
Construction of big data
Big data in Heritage

July 30, 2013: submission of full workshop papers

Other dates and submission details here.

"The End of Cinema and the Future of Cinema Studies" conference, 4/12/2003

2013-04-11T15:04:00.000-04:00

Lev Manovich will be speaking about visualizing cinema at The End of Cinema and the Future of Cinema Studies conference, 4/12/2003, Philadelphia

Pixelated Politics: Still and Moving Images in the Digital Age, Graduate Center CUNY, April 9, 6:30pm

2013-04-07T10:00:00.000-04:00

Pixelated Politics: Still & Moving Images in the Digital Age
Mariam Ghani, Lev Manovich, Nick Mirzoeff, Christiane Paul, Natalie Musteata, McKenzie Wark

date: Apr 9, 2013, 6:30pm

location: Martin E. Segal Theatre,
The Graduate Center, The City University of New York (CUNY).
365 5th Ave New York, NY

Participants: Mariam Ghani, artist and writer; Lev Manovich, Digital Humanities, The Graduate Center, CUNY; Nicholas Mirzoeff, Media, Culture and Communication, New York University; Christiane Paul, Media Studies, The New School, and New Media Arts at The Whitney Museum of American Art; McKenzie Wark, Culture and Media, The New School.

Organized and moderated by Natalie Musteata, Art History, The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Cosponsored by the PhD Program in Art History and the Certificate Program in Film Studies.

---------------------------

Illustration: Christian Giordano’s Tagged Color visualization of Flickr images and tags

"If an image is tagged “summer,” what colors do you expect? What images come to mind with the word “magenta?” What colors are people compelled to photograph? Christian Giordano’s Tagged Color visualization explores these questions and more. By mapping the user-supplied color field data and the most popular correlating tags, this visualization shows fascinating trends in the obsession with color. As you’d expect, “winter” retrieves a palette of blues, grays, and ebony; friendly purple correlates well with other colors; green’s the most-tagged color; and lonely cyan is always reported correctly, but doesn’t correlate well to any particular photo subject. Even in this age of RGB, the sky is blue on Flickr." [source: http://onemansblog.com/2011/01/14/5-impressive-flickr-visualizations/]

new PhD program in Digital Design at European Graduate School

2013-04-06T13:55:00.000-04:00

Digital Design PhD Program at European Graduate School

Under its Director, Wolfgang Schirmacher, the European Graduate School [EGS] is currently inviting expressions of interest in a new 'Digital Design' stream within the EGS Media and Communication Division's Postgraduate Program leading to a possible PhD.

The EGS already has a very strong reputation in the area of Critical Theory, Philosophy and Media/Film Theory, counting some of the most illustrious thinkers in the world among its faculty, including Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Helene Cixous, Jean Luc Nancy, Manuel De Landa, Lev Manovich, and Paul Virilio. It also has a strong reputation in the area of Media and Communications, with some of the leading figures in Film and Art. The EGS postgraduate program is designed for working professionals, and residential requirements are limited to attendance of a series of brief, intense workshops in the summer months at its base in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. For further details please see the EGS website: http://www.egs.edu/

The EGS is currently exploring the possibility of a new 'digital design' stream within the Media and Communication Division. If there prove to be sufficient initial expressions of interest from prospective students, the EGS will evaluate the establishment of this new program. The program will then begin in September 2013, with the first residential workshop taking place in Saas-Fee in June 2014, provided that it meets the basic minimum requirement of 20+ confirmed applicants.

The urge to establish a new Digital Design PhD stream within the Media and Communication Division at EGS stems in part from the limited number of PhD programs in this field, compared to the relative proliferation of masters programs around the world. It also stems from the growing expectation for academics to hold PhD degrees. But, above all, it stems from the demand for a relatively low cost PhD program that is flexible enough to allow those working in architectural offices or teaching in academic institutions to continue their employment while undertaking their PhD research. Current overall fees for a 4 year PhD with the EGS amount to $24, 450, making it an attractive financial option, compared to most other programs.

A number of pre-eminent figures from the field of Digital Design have already offered to teach on the new program:

John Frazer is regarded by many as the godfather of architectural computation, and acknowledged as a leader in the field of evolutionary digital design, and originator of the Evolutionary Digital Design Process. His seminal book, An Evolutionary Architecture, is regarded as a classic within the field.
www.johnfrazer.com/

Mark Burry is Professor of Innovation at RMIT, and Director of the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory and founding Director of the Design Research Institute at RMIT. He is also executive architect and researcher for the Sagrada Familia Church in Barcelona, Spain.
http://www.sial.rmit.edu.au/People/mburry+Biography.php

Achim Menges is a Professor at the University of Stuttgart and a founding member of the Institute for Computational Design. His work focuses on the development of integral design processes at the intersection of morphogenetic computation, biomimetic engineering and computer aided manufacturing.
http://icd.uni-stuttgart.de/?p=897

Manuel De Landa is the Gilles Deleuze Professor of Contemporary Philosophy and Science at the European Graduate School. He also teaches at Pratt Institute, USC, and UPenn. He is the author of a series of highly influential books, including A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History and Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy.
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/manuel-de-landa/biography/

Patrik Schumacher is a partner in Zaha Hadid Architects, and a founding director of the AA DRL. He studied both architecture and philosophy in London, Bonn and Stuttgart, and holds a PhD from Klagenfurt University. He has taught at many schools of architecture, and is the author of a two volume edition, The Autopoiesis of Architecture.
http://www.patrikschumacher.com/

Alisa Andrasek is an experimental practitioner and research based educator of architecture and computational processes in design. She now teaches design and theory seminars at the Bartlett School of Architecture, having previously taught at Columbia GSAP and the Architectural Association. She is a Director of Biothing/CONTINUUM.
http://www.biothing.org/?page_id=2

Mette Thomsen is Professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, where she directs the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture. Her work focuses on Digital Crafting as a way of thinking material practice, computation and fabrication as part of architectural culture.
http://cita.karch.dk/

Neil Leach is a designer and architectural theorist, who has published 23 books on architectural theory and digital design. He has taught at several leading schools of architecture, including SCI-Arc, Columbia GSAP, AA, DIA, IaaC and USC, and is a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Fellow developing robotic fabrication technologies for printing structures on the Moon and Mars.
http://arch.usc.edu/faculty/leach

In the first year instructors will each offer 3 days of intensive lectures over the residential summer workshop in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. These lectures are designed to fulfill the requirements of the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) regarding contact hours and student workload.

During their second year students get the chance to study under the other illustrious EGS professors. Aside from Slavoj Zizek, and the other figures mentioned above, these also include others working in architecture and digital theory, such as Geert Lovink, Lev Manovich, Mitchell Joachim and Hendrik Speck. As they enter their third year, upon completion of all course work and examinations, students will be invited to establish supervisory arrangements with the individual professors. Research is expected to be self-directed according to the European model.

Students interested in the program are invited to send an initial expression of interest, together with a one page CV by 15 April 2013 to:

Neil Leach
leachneil@hotmail.com

our ImagePlot software is used in #OCCUPYDATA NYC Hackaphon

2013-03-24T13:57:00.000-04:00

Image plot of almost 400 OccuPrint posters organized by visual similarity.

"In addition, we’ve a human pattern recognition task underway in the gallery... it appears that gallery visitors are using the same types of features to understand and visualize patterns in the OccuPrint poster set. However, one distinction is incredibly striking, speed. Relative to computer efficiency, human work feels more like geologic time."

#OCCUPYDATA NYC is a series of Hackathons taking place in NYC. (The next one is on April 22nd, 2013. 8pm. Kellen Auditorium @ The New School, 66 Fifth Avenue).

During the last hackthon which took place at The Graduate Center CUNY, the participants used our free software tool ImagePlot to analyze and visualize a collection of almost 400 Occuprint posters. (Occuprint "collects, prints and distributes posters from the worldwide Occupy movement.")

"Occuprint Image Analysis" results and visualizations are available here:

Occuprint Image Analysis

ImagePlot software download and documentation:

http://lab.softwarestudies.com/p/imageplot.html

Modular Complexity and Remix: The Collapse of Time and Space into Search, by Eduardo Navas

2013-03-19T10:00:00.001-04:00

Image: from top and left to right: sliced image analysis of Downfall meme, detail of Downfall meme, grid detail of Radiohead's Lotus Flower meme, and grid image montage of The Charleston Style meme.

Note: This text was written for the peer review Journal AnthroVision 1.1 | 2012 : First issue. It was published in September of 2012. It is released here with permission from the editors. A special thanks to Nadine Wanono and the peer reviewers for all their support in the process of revising and publishing the text. This essay is the first formal release of my post-doc research for The Department of Information Science and Media Studies at The University of Bergen, Norway in collaboration with The Software Studies Lab at Calit2, University of California, San Diego during the period of 2010-2012. I will be releasing more of my research in the near future. For now, you may also look over related material, available in Remix Theory under Projects.

The complete article: Download PDF

To cite this article:

Référence électronique
Eduardo Navas, « Modular Complexity and Remix: The Collapse of Time and Space into Search », Anthrovision [En ligne], 1.1 | 2012, mis en ligne le 01 septembre 2012, consulté le 15 mars 2013. URL : http://lodel.revues.org/10/anthrovision/324

Excerpt:

If postmodernity consisted of the collapse of time into space, then the time of globalization at the beginning of the twenty-first century consists of the collapse of time and space into search. Culture has entered a stage in which time and space are redefined by modular access to knowledge in unprecedented fashion with the use of search engines. Search redefines the way people come to terms with historical developments that are constantly recycled and remixed with the use of new media technology. A search is usually performed with engines such as Google and Bing; technology that is founded on research that brings together private and public interests.

This text is a reflection on the implications behind search algorithms that provide people with material that is relevant in correlation to a hierarchy of supposed importance that may reach great popularity, and perhaps even go viral (large circulation online) according to the use of key terms known as meta-data. This text is an evaluation of the aesthetics of search made possible because of what I call modular complexity; meaning, the ability to function within a system of modules that are autonomous but that also effectively inform and redefine each other.[1] This, in effect, leads to the collapse of time and space into search; meaning, if the postmodern gave way to a sense of historical dismissal, such attitude is fully at play in networked culture as ahistoricity. This shift, which informs emerging markets on the global network, repurposes interdisciplinary methodologies across fields of research in the social sciences as well as the humanities.

[1] I first introduce the concept of Modular Complexity in the Essay “Remix: The Ethics of Modular Complexity in Sustainability,” written for CSPA Journal’s Spring 2010 issue. See: http://remixtheory.net/?p=461

The complete article: Download PDF

Relevant links in this blog are:

Research on Remix and Cultural Analytics, Part 1

Research on Remix and Cultural Analytics, Part 2

Research on Remix and Cultural Analytics, Part 3

Research on Remix and Cultural Analtytics, Part 4

Research on Remix and Cultural Analytics, Part 5

Call for Proposals: Graduate Center CUNY Provost’s Digital Innovation Grants

2013-03-17T11:28:00.000-04:00

Visualization from the project by Micki Kaufman (PhD student in History, The Graduate Center CUNY): “Data Mining Diplomacy”: A Computational Analysis of the State Department’s Foreign Policy Files

Call for Proposals: Graduate Center CUNY Provost’s Digital Innovation Grants

Deadline: April 8, 2013

To submit: Send a single PDF file containing all parts of the application to gcdi@gc.cuny.edu with “Provost’s Digital Innovation Grant Proposal” in the subject line.

The Graduate Center CUNY Digital Initiatives project of the Provost’s Office is delighted to announce a call for proposals in support of innovative digital projects designed, created, programmed, or administered by matriculated doctoral students in good academic standing at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Proposal application details: http://gcdi.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2013/03/15/call-for-proposals-provosts-digital-innovation-grants/

Winning proposals from the 2012-2013 competition: http://gcdi.commons.gc.cuny.edu/category/provosts-digital-innovation-grants/

Award range: $500 to $3000

ImagePlot user guide in Polish / analysis of V for Vendetta

2013-03-09T10:30:00.000-05:00

Dr. Radosław Bomba (MediaLab, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland) has been succesfully using our free ImagePlot software in his classes.

Here is the example of one the student projects - Aleksander Stando's visual analysis of V for Vendetta movie and comparison it with the original comic book:

Radosław developed a guide to ImagePlot in Polish. We are looking forward to more interesting ptojects to come from his classes.

The page of UMCS MediaLab (Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin) has a number of other projects by students which use ImagePlot and other tools for quantitative cultural analysis and visualization (Let Google translate it from Polish into the language your read)

The Programmable City openings: 4 postdocs (5 years) and 4 PhD students (4 years)

2013-03-08T09:00:00.000-05:00

The Programmable City

5 year research project directed by Rob Kitchin

Avaiable positions:

4 postdocs (5 years) and 4 PhD students (4 years)

The project is an empirical extension of the Code/Space book (Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge) published in Software Studies series by The MIT Press (2011). It focuses on the intersection of smart urbanism, ubiquitous computing and big data from a software studies/critical geography perspective, comparing Dublin and Boston and other locales.

The positions are not restricted to any discipline.

Postdoctoral Researchers X 2 Posts (the othee 2 posts will be advertized later this year)
Closing date for applications 22nd March 2013
Further details

Funded PhDs X 4 Posts
Closing date for applications 12th April 2013
Further details

Prof. Rob Kitchin is Director of NIRSA, and Chairperson of the Irish Social Sciences Platform. He has published widely across the social sciences, including 20 books and over 100 articles and book chapters. He is editor of the international journals, Progress in Human Geography (ISI rank 2/61) and Dialogues in Human Geography, and for eleven years was the editor of Social and Cultural Geography. His book 'Code/Space' (with Martin Dodge) won the Association of American Geographers 'Meridian Book Award' for the outstanding book in the discipline in 2011 and a 'CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2011' award from the American Library Association.

Theorizing the Web 2013 (#TtW13) Conference, March 1-2, The Graduate Center, CUNY

2013-02-28T09:00:00.000-05:00

Visitors flow for softwarestudies.com (Google Analytics screen grab)

Theorizing the Web 2013 (#TtW13) Conference

Saturday, March 1-2
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

Conference program:

http://justpublics365.commons.gc.cuny.edu/events/ttw13-conference/

I am speaking at Memory and the Speed of Data | Room C | #c1 session, Saturday May 2, 11:00am-12:15pm.

Mary Flanagan 4:00pm-5:30pm, Room C204-205, CUNY Graduate Center

2013-02-27T09:00:00.000-05:00

Thursday February 28:

Mary Flanagan

“Never Mind the Body, Here’s a Gamepad? Considering Embodiment in The Age of Play”

4:00pm-5:30pm, Room C204-205, CUNY Graduate Center,
365 5th Ave, New York.

Sponsored by the English Student Association, Doctoral Students’ Council, GC Digital Initiatives, and CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative.

Opening keynote for Minding the Body: Dualism and its Discontents, an interdisciplinary conference hosted by the English Student Association at CUNY Graduate Center.

This keynote presentation explores a pervasive onscreen/offscreen split of identification and the body in what we could now call The Age of Play. Citing examples from artists’ work and popular culture, with a focus on games, Flanagan leads the audience on an investigation of current trends that are in diametrical opposition: on the one hand, a hunger for embodied, resonant experience; and on the other, a desire for control for the body, a recurring motif in fields from psychology to public health, manifesting in plastic surgery and digital manipulation of the body.

Mary Flanagan is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College and Director of Tiltfactor Laboratory. She writes at Grand Text Auto; see also her work on Values at Play.

Our guide for working with cultural data: organizing, cleaning, summarizing

2013-02-15T10:00:00.001-05:00

I put together detailed notes for my how-to class working with cultural data

Organizing data, cleaning data, preparing data for analysis and visualization, creating data summaries

(wait for the link to load since its inside a long web page for my whole course)

The selection of topics and techniques is based on our work in the lab with hundreds of data sets since 2007, and the number of courses I taught on cultural data analysis and visualization for both undergraduates and graduate students.

These topics and techniques can be taught in a 2-3 class.

Intended audiences: all beginning digital humanities people (faculty and students) regardless of the field (art history, literary studies, commmunication, etc); people interested in visualizing data; data journalism.

OS XXI: Art’s Digital Future panel, Feb. 13 (today) The Graduate Center, CUNY

2013-02-13T10:20:00.002-05:00

OS XXI: Art’s Digital Future

Panel discussion

Martin E Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center

12.30-2pm, 13 February 2013

Speakers:

Paul Chan is an artist, who founded the press Badlands Unlimited in 2010. Badlands’ latest book is Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews by Calvin Tomkins, available as an enhanced e-book on Apple iBooks and Amazon Kindle and IRL at all fine independent bookshops.

Brian Droitcour is a critic and curator, and a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature at NYU. He writes frequently on new media art.

Lev Manovich is Professor of Computer Science at CUNY Graduate Center, whose research focuses on visualizing massive image sets including painting, film and user generated art. His publications include The Language of New Media (2001) and Software Takes Command (2013).

Virginia Rutledge is an art advisor and lawyer focused on contemporary art and intellectual property. A Graduate Center alum, she has also been a curator (LACMA), corporate litigator (Cravath) and nonprofit VP and general counsel (Creative Commons).

Chaired by Claire Bishop, Associate Professor in the PhD Program in Art History, CUNY Graduate Center.

The art market still revolves around artefacts produced as one-offs or in limited editions, and which still bear the traces of the artist’s hand – in the form of signatures, certificates of authentication, or customized dvd presentation boxes. At the same time, we increasingly consume art digitally – via search engine queries, online databases, gallery websites, our own photographic documentation, or on ubu.web. How is the digital revolution affecting the production and dissemination of art? What opportunities does the internet afford a younger generation of curators, researchers and critics? And finally, are we making too much of the digital as a rupture – or can it be placed in a continuity with earlier developments in reproductive technology (photography, film, video)?

Sponsored by the Ph.D. in Art History, CUNY Graduate Center, and supported by the Sally and Nick Webster Art History Fund.

MA Thesis: Identifying Affordances in Adobe Photoshop

2013-02-02T08:49:00.001-05:00

New software studies publication which analyzes the key artistic tool of out times - Photoshop:

Identifying affordances in Adobe Photoshop:
An investigation into the theory of affordances and its use insoftware analyses

MA Thesis by Herman van den Muijsenberg

New Media & Digital Culture, Utrecht University
Advisor: Dr. Ann-Sophie Lehmann

76 pages.

THE PUBLIC PRIVATE exhibition curated by Christiane Paul, Feb. 6 opening

2013-01-31T09:00:00.000-05:00

THE PUBLIC PRIVATE

Sheila C. Johnson Design Center  Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery

2 W 13th St., NY, NY 10011

February 7 - April 17, 2013

Opening reception: Wednesday, February 6, 6:00 - 8:00 pm

The Public Private explores the impact of social media and new technologies on the relationship between the public and private realm. The artworks brought together in The Public Private address these issues from psychological, legal, and economic perspectives and use strategies ranging from hacking to self-surveillance to reflect upon the profound changes in our understanding of identity, personal boundaries, and self-representation.

Works on view include Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico’s Face to Facebook, a multimedia installation of one million Facebook profiles, which were “appropriated” by the artists, filtered using facial-recognition software, and then posted on a custom-made dating website sorted by facial expressions. Eva and Franco Mattes’ The Others is a video installation composed of 10,000 photos the Mattes have acquired through a software glitch that gives remote access to personal computers. The core of the work is not just the presentation of these images, but the act of “stealing” and moving them from the private into the public realm.

Other artists and works represented in the gallery include Jill Magid’s Evidence Locker, Luke Dubois’ Missed Connections, Wafaa Bilal’s 3rdi, Carlo Zanni’s Self Portrait with Friends, James Coupe's Panoptic Panorama #2: Five People in a Room, Paolo Cirio’s Street Ghosts, and Ben Grosser’s Facebook Demetricator.

The Public Private is curated by Christiane Paul, an Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School and Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

class schedule - "Big Data, Visualization, and Digital Humanities", Manovich's course, spring 2013

2013-01-27T17:14:00.000-05:00

The schedule for my class Big Data, Visualization, and Digital Humanities which runs this semester at The Graduate Center, CUNY is available at this URL (Google doc):

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mf6qlFNqwLLvVPlWAOy0eK3HfbgLlJgIJSyEImM4uSg/edit

Facebook Graph Search, database, data stream, and data visualization

2013-01-15T16:24:00.003-05:00

Facebook announced its new Graph Search on 01/15/2013:

http://www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch

With Graph Search, Facebook becomes a little more like a DATABASE for its users (many dimensions, time is less relevant) - as opposed to the present massive 1-dimensional data stream (present -> past):

This is how Facebook engineers who developed Graph search also expained the project to Wired: "“It’s like Facebook is this big database and you’re doing a lookup on the results that match."

For me, it is a new example of how database/narrative opposition in digital media (which accompanied it from the start) works now in web apps and services. Database is "spatial" - you can search and use other operations to get records using all fields, with time stamp being just one dimension among others.

A narrative (and a timeline) strongly mark a single dimension: time. Things become related if they occur close to each other in time. (In a timeline, other dimensions of similarity and possible links between far away points are not visible). Posts and replies on FB is one example (do you often comment on posts from a month before?); film editing is another example- a sequence of shots made to work together visually. (Of course, filmmakers and other artists also play with the functions and limits of our memory, making connections between events that can be far apart in a narrative stream.)

P.S. Connections to data visualization:

From this perspective, a scatter plot is more close to a database logic - especially with interactive options (and extended to graph matrix, etc.) ; a line graph is more like a narrative, with moods, anticipation or other analog qualities going up and down.

For an example that visualizes the linear/spatial opposition, see this classic project by Martin Wattenberg (2001): http://www.turbulence.org/Works/song/gallery/gallery.html

For one possible way to visualize a film combining narrative and spatial representations to help us study the connections between shots, sequences and themes, see these visualizations from my new article "Visualizing Vertov"

http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/3988919869/in/set-72157632441192048/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/8349177898/in/set-72157632441192048/

"Visualizing Vertov" - new article by Lev Manovich with 33 visualizations available for download

2013-01-11T09:30:00.000-05:00

Lev Manovich. Visualizing Vertov. 2013. [PDF 10 MB].

10,000 words. 33 visualizations.

View high resolution versions of all visualizations discussed in the article on Flickr.

You can also download a single archive file containing article PDF and full-resolution versions of all visualizations:

Visualizing_Vertov.text_and_illustrations.zip 2013. [ZIP, 58 MB].

All shots with close-ups of faces from The Eleventh Year (Dziga Vertov, 1928). The shots are arranged in the order of their apperance in the film, left to right, top to bottom.

The article presents visualization analysis of the films The Eleventh Year (1928) and Man with a Movie Camera (1929) by the famous Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov. One of the goals of the project is to show how various dimensions of films can be explored using special visualization techniques inspired by media and new media art, as well as the basic principle of cinema itself - editing (i.e., selecting and arranging together media elements).

In some cases, we use digital image processing software to measure visual properties of every film frame, and then plot these measurements along with the selected frames. (For example, this approach allows us to visualize the amounts of movement in every shot in a film.)

In other cases, we don’t measure or count anything. Instead, we arrange the sampled frames from a film in a single high-resolution visualizations in particular layouts. (For example, we can represent a feature film as a grid of frames - one frame for every shot.)

This use of visualization without measurements, counting, or adding annotations is the crucial aspect of my lab’s approach for working with media collections. We hope that it can add to other approaches already used in quantitative film studies and digital humanities.

The article presents a sequence of 33 visualizations which start from a “bird’s eye” view of the cultural artifacts (e.g., hundreds of 20th century films) and gradually zooms in closer and closer, eventually focusing on details of a single shot – similar to how Google Earth allows you to start with the Earth view and then zoom in and eventually enter a street view.

The article is an experiment. It does not develop a single argument or a concept. Instead, I progressively “zoom” into cinema, exploring alternative ways to visualize film media at different levels, and noting interesting observations along the way.

The digital copies of Vertov's films were provided by The Austrian Film Museum (Vienna) which has one of the best colllectoons of film prints and other Vertov materials. I am grateful to film researcher and Austrian Film Museum staff member Adelheid Heftberger for initiating and making possible this project in 2009, and providing detailed feedback on the work as it developed.

Publication information:
The first part of this article will appear in Russian Journal of Communication (Taylor & Francis); the second part will appear in Cinematicity, eds. Jeff Geiger and Karin Littau (Edinburgh University Press.)

Support:
The work of Software Studies Initiative on visualizing cinema, TV, animation, motion graphics and video games received grants from NEH, NSF, Mellon Foundation, Calit2 and UCSD. Special thanks go to Larry Smarr and Ramesh Rao at Calit2 who made our lab possible, and continuosly support our work since 2007.

Cover of "Software Takes Command" is here

2013-01-03T13:18:00.004-05:00

Bloomsbury Academic will publish my next book Software Takes Command in July 2013. Below is their final design for the book cover.

The background image is a close-up of a visualization created in my lab by my PhD student and USC Video Game program faculty member William Huber. The visualization condenses 62.5 hours of video gameplay into a single image consisting from 22.500 sampled frames.

You can download the full resolution visualization (10,800 x 8000 pixels) from our Flickr gallery.

Book details are here: http://lab.softwarestudies.com/p/softbook.html