Software Studies

Cultural Analytics lecture by Manovich in London, March 9, 2010

2010-03-08T10:00:00.000-08:00

what: lecture by Lev Manovich about cultural analytics

date: March 8, 2010

time: 2pm

location:
Castle Lecture Theatre, London Road Building.
Keyworth Street.
London South Bank University

map of the campus

Note: Kate Hayles will lecture first at 1pm

-----------------------
Lecture outline:

1 rize of visualization of culture
information visualization as a key new techique for representation appropriate for information society - and also (if it's interactive) a new technique for thinking
simultaneos development of www and infovis in early 90s
2004-: Processing + availability of large data sets + APIs

2 what is visualization?
reduction – use of graphical primitives
layout which reveals patterns

humanities visualization – creating layouts from actual media objects, as opposed to representing them via graphical primitives (no additional metadata is added)

techniques:

gather (Time montage)

highlight (Anna Karenina, Hamlet) / continuity between a "full" media object and visualization/diagram

sample (gameplay montages, Time slice, folder: Vertov sample)

calculate (folder: Vertov averages)

is this visualization?

Culture visualization today - usually visualization of metadata about artifacts and process ( see visualization of social networks at visualcomplexity.com). In contrast we want to show relations between actual artifacts .
Shall we call image graphs and other techniques which involve arranging images (or their sample) in particular ways "visualization"? If we assume that the core principle of visualization is not reduction and (therefore) use of vector primitives such as points and lines (which also form the language of diagrams and sketched in art) but rather the arrangments of elements in a layout which shows patterns/relationships betwen elements, then the answer is yes.
Note also that if normal visualizations consist from symbolic signs (vector elements which stand for the objects and which signify through an agreed code), "direct visualization" uses objects themselves. Therefore it does not involve signification or reduction. (in that direct visualization parallels figurative art which also does not signify real-life objects through signs but represents them in detail, and which also communicates meaning through layout - traditionally called composition. Buy while the goal of figurative art is communication of meaning, visualization only shows patterns - it's up to the researcher to interpret them as meaningful.
20th century cultural theory and media art often focused on close reading of media - zomming in and slowing it down (think of "24 hour Psycho") But after media explosion (social media and archives digitization) we need to learn how to zoom out, fast forward, compress (visually), summarize - so we can make sense of vast cultural landscapes.
Visualization dumensions:
functional - aesthetic;
using established familiar methods - inventing new methods.
Lots of artistic visualization is purely aesthetic - I.e. It's not trying to reveal patterns but only uses visualization principle of deriving images from data to make abstract art.
Where does culturevis fits in? Ideally we want to be both functional and aesthetic ( find forms which best express the particular artifacts and cultures). (examples of my diff visualizations of vertov shot lengths). However if we want to be able to compare many artifacts, we need to use the same technique.

We can use Pierce's signs classification - icon, index, symbol, diagram - in relations to visualization. This scheme describes the types of relations between a sign and a referent. But we can also add a new dimension which describes "how much" a sign represents, so to speak - does it show more or less information about the referent, and what kind of information?
Normally, we think of visualization (i.e. a representation which uses vector elements) and a realistic image (a photograph or a painting) as opposites, one representing the bare minimum structure of an object and the other representing the object's sensorial appearance in detail. But if we look at them using our new "how much and what is represented" dimension, we see that there are all kinds of intermediate cases. Therefore realistic representation and vector visualizations are just the extremes of a continuos dimension.
At the same time, there is a qualitative diff between Marey's chronophotographs which diagram motion and visualizations which may represent relations which are not directly visible (such as economic data) - so on this dimension indexical diagrams (such as Marey) and visualizations are diff categories.

3 cultural analytics: data analysis + visualization
add metadata (via manual annotation and/or automatic analysis), then visualize

Some of the key advantages of this method:

automatic analysis + “image graphs”:
1) understanding meaning and/or cause behind the pattern (for instance, a repeating movement pattern in Vertov is sometimes due to parallel montage, but in other cases its not)
2) revealing additional patterns (for instance, changes in communication techniques across Time covers)

visualizing (analog / continuous) cultural dimensions which can’t be adequately described with language (which uses discrete categories)

visualizing continuously changing qualities over time
particularly useful for 21st century motion graphics and films, but also opens a new direction for understanding 20th century cinema / rhythm / time series analysis
example: movement pattern in "11th Year"
example: Time covers (change over a longer period)
example: US, French and Soviet 20th century films: comparing shot lengths

4 beoynd categories: aggregation without structure
Latour’s arguments: tracking and representing aggregates of objects, without the need to go to another level of model, structure, etc. (“Tarde’s idea of quantification” in Mattei Candea, ed. The Social After Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments.)
Extending these arguments to culture visualization:
from categories (i.e. genres, historical periods, etc.) to a multi-dimensional space of features where we can see objects forming distributions and clusters

Latour: "we should find ways to gather individual "he" and "she" without losing out on the specific ways in which they are able to mingle.... But never in some overarching society. The challenge is to try to obtain their aggregation without either shifting our attention at any point to a whole, or changing modes of inquiry."
Similarly, we need to get away from the standard distinction betwen an individual cultural artifact and larger categories be they "cultures," "genres", etc. We need new ways of studying aggregates - bottom up ( which is what data analysis + visualization make possible.) Here the ability of computers to keep tracks of large volumes of data and navigate through the data at arbitrary zoom levels without the need for aggregation, simplification or averaging becomes crucial. (Rather than seeing Manga space as a map consisting from a few ditinct regions, we can show every single page and observe patterns of contonuos change across this space.) Modern computing allows us to analyze, record and represent "individual variations" (Latour) of billions of entities - thus making possible for social and cultural sciences to become truly scientific in a way still inaccessible for natural sciences (because their entities - such as gas molecules - are still too numerous for computers to represent individually and therefore they have to use general models to represent their structure and behavior.
"Structure is what is imagined to fill the gaps when there is a deficit of information as to the ways any entity inherits from it's predecessors and successors." ( we still have the problem of mapping exactly this information. However we can at least start by refusing structures such as "genre", "period" etc.)
"Individual variations are the only phenomenon worth looking at in societies for which there are comparatively few elements."

visualizations_vs_categories folder
example: Manga analysis
example: modernism folder

Latour: "through the ease with which we can navigate a datascape, we manage to interrupt the transubstantiation of the aggrgate into a law, a structure, a model and complicate the way through which one monad may come to summarize the "whole."
"But the "whole" is now nothing more than a provisional visualization which can be modified and reversed at will, by moving back to the individual cimponents, and then looking for yer other tools to regroup the sane elements into alternative assemlages."
"The whole lost its provilleged status: we can produce out if the same data points, as many aggregates as we see fit, while reverting back at any time, to the individual components."

Do we still need discrete categories? Map of Science example

alpha version of new Cultural Analytics software

2010-03-04T07:33:00.000-08:00

We are happy to announce the alpha release of a new Cultural Analytics software.

It was developed in Multimodal Analysis Lab at National University of Singapore (director: Kay O’Halloran) in collaboration with Software Studies Initiative at Calit2/UCSD (director: Lev Manovich).

Conceptual design: Lev Manovich (Calit2/UCSD), Bertrand Grandgeorge (NUS), Jeremy Douglass (Calit2)
Programming: Bertrand Grandgeorge.

Screenshot: Exploring a set of 450 Time covers (sampled from the complete set of 4553 cover, 1923-2009 by taking every 10th image). The images with red frame around them are the covers representing women - selected by using a bar chart (bottom left corner).

Screenshot: Exploring a set of 450 Time covers (sampled from the complete set of 4553 cover, 1923-2009 by taking every 10th image). Mousing over points reveals larger images and metadata.

Our software is developed in Flash/Flex so it can run on any PC or MAC. Some of its distinctive features:

- software supports all standard graph types - however if standard graphing/visualization application represent data as vector primitives, our graphs can also show the actual images. For instance, you can make a scatter plot where images are placed on top of the points. You can change the size of images at any point; mousing over reveals the larger image.

- it supports one of the most powerful techniques for data exploration - coordinated views. Selecting subset of data in one graph automatically highlights this subset in all our graphs. In our implementation this feature works both with vector graphics (bar charts, pie charts, histograms) and image graphs.

- software can be used for both interactive explorations of patterns in visual artifacts (images of art, design, photography, web pages, films, animation, video of gameplay etc.) and producing high-res publication and exhibition quality images. You can specify the size and position of each visualization on a canvas and then save the results at 300dpi.

- It is very easy to prepare the data. You only need is a directory of images and a text file (.csv) describing locations of the images (filenames) and metadata. It can be created in Excel, Google Docs or any text processor.

we are hiring in Singapore

2010-03-04T07:18:00.000-08:00

we have an opening in Singapore - you will work directly with Lev Manovich on cultural analytics projects.

Position:
Cultural Analytics Researcher

Job Description:
We are a research lab at National University of Singapore (www.multimodal-analysis-lab.org) working on an innovative cultural project which uses data analysis and information visualization on large cultural data sets such as 1 million Manga pages (see www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/).The project is carried by a group of NUS faculty together with Lev Manovich's lab at UCSD (www.softwarestudies.com).

We are looking for a very motivated and talented person to join our team on a part-time or full-time basis (depending on your skills and availability; flexible work hours are also possible.) You will participate in the analysis of cultural data and design of new visualizations (see www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/). You will also be responsible for designing, implementing and updating a blog about the project and creating and disseminating content for social media networks (facebook, vimeo, twitter, etc.) and mailing lists.

Required skills:
Very strong communication skills including writing content; contemporary design sensibility; good 2D design and typography skills; knowledge of graphics software such as Photoshop and Illustrator; substantial experience in using blogs and social media, knowledge of Excel; HTML, CSS and Blogger or Wordpress software.

Desired skills:
Knowledge of software tools for manipulating data such as MySQL, Unix scripting, or Python; programming in Processing or Flash.

Term of Appointment:
To be negotiated.

Contact Person:

To apply, please email your resume to Melany Legaspi at: melany@nus.edu.sg
Please include a URL for your online portfolio.

Versão Alpha do novo software de Analítica Cultural

2010-03-03T08:20:00.000-08:00

O projeto Analítica Cultural lança o seu mais novo software.

O programa foi desenvolvido no Multimedia Analysis Lab na Universidade Nacional de Cingapura (sob a direção de: Kay O’Halloran) em colaboração com o grupo de estudos Software Studies Initiative do Calit2/UCSD (sob a direção de Lev Manovich).

Design: Lev Manovich (Calit2/UCSD), Bertrand Grandgeorge (NUS), Jeremy Douglass (Calit2)
Programação: Bertrand Grandgeorge.

Imagem: Explorando um conjunto de 450 capas da revista Times (uma amostra de um conjunto com 4553 capas, entre 1923 e 2009, utilizando de 10 em 10 imagens e mostrando a décima). As imagens com o frame vermelho as circulando são de capas com imagens representando mulheres - selecionadas utilizando um gráfico de barras (no canto esquerdo inferior).

Imagem: Explorando um conjunto de 450 capas da revista Time (uma amostra de um conjunto com 4553 capas, entre 1923 e 2009, utilizando de 10 em 10 imagens e mostrando a décima). Sobrepondo o mouse sobre os pontos, aumentam-se as imagens e os metadados.

O software foi desenvolvido em Flash/Flex , portanto roda em qualquer PC ou MAC. Veja alguns recursos:

- o software suporta todos os tipos de gráficos - contudo se o a aplicação padrão do grafo/visualização representa os dados como vetores primitivos, nossos gráficos podem também mostrar a imagem atual. Por exemplo: você pode fazer um ponto de fuga onde as imagens estão localizadas em cima dos pontos. Você pode modificar o tamanho das imagens a qualquer momento. Ao passar o mouse sobre a imagem, a imagem se abre.

- suporta uma das técnicas mais avançadas de exploração de dados. - a visão por coordenadas. Ao selecionar um subgrupo de dados em um determinado gráfico, o sistema automaticamente destaca os gráficos nos grupos subsequentes. Em nossa implementação, essa ferramenta funciona tanto em gráficos vetorizados (gráficos de barra, histogramas) como em gráficos de imagens.

- o software pode ser utilizado tanto para explorações interativas de padrões de artefatos visuais (imagens de arte, design, fotografia, páginas web, filmes, animações ou jogos de videogame) quanto para produzir publicações em alta definição de imagens com alta qualidade. Você pode especificar o tamanho e a posição de cada visualização na tela e salvar os resultados em 300dpi's.

- é extremamente fácil preparar os dados. Você somente precisa de um diretório com imagens e um arquivo de texto em padrão .CSV descrevendo o local a localização das imagens (nomes dos arquivos) e os metadados. O arquivo pode ser criado em Excel, Google Doc ou em qualquer outro processador de textos.

article about Software Studies work with National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center

2010-02-24T02:15:00.000-08:00

A new article describes how we are working with National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) to pioneer use of supercomputers for the analysis of visual media in the humanities context:

Linda Vu
February 18, 2010

A Computational Science Approach for Analyzing Culture

Below are some of the visualizations which use the the results of processing of our data sets on NERSC:

All Time magazine covers for 1923-1989: 3480 total.

All Time covers for 1923-1989: 3480 total.
Covers showing people: 2583.
Covers showing women: 260.

All Time covers for 1923-1989: 3480 total.
Covers showing people: 2583.
Covers showing people of color: 306.

1,000,000 Manga pages visualization project is moving forward

2010-02-14T19:36:00.000-08:00

In the summer 2009 we started on our most ambitious Cultural Analytics project to date - analysis and visualization of 1,000,000 Manga pages.

Here are some initial visualizations of this data - as we create more, they will be added to our Flickr set. While these visualizations are static, we are also using the unique HIPerSpace 300 megapixel system developed at Calit2 with our custom software to explore these Manga pages interactively.

Manga categories and genres graphs

Manga visualizations

Visualization shows 1048576 Manga pages
Each point represents one page

grey points - all pages in the set
red points - all pages corresponding to a single title: Anatolia Story (artist: Chie Shinohara)

to create visualizations, we measured each page separately on NERSC supercomputers and plotted the results
X axis - brightness mean
Y axis - entropy

Data: 10 titles from our complete set of 912 titles.
Visualization shows all pages (approximately 50,000) corresponding to these titles.
X axis - grey scale standard deviation
Y axis - entropy

Note: if you click on the image above, you can download 10,000x10,000 jpeg version (scaled down from the original 44,000x44,000 visualization) - 10 MB file

Data: "Tetsuwan Girl" comic by Takahashi Tsutomu. The complete comic contains 1094 pages. This visualization is a zoomed view which omits outlires - so not all pages are seen.
X axis - grey scale standard deviation
Y axis - entropy

This visualization shows how cultural analytics approach allows us to map continuous style space of a cultural data set.

Data: "Tetsuwan Girl" comic by Takahashi Tsutomu. The complete comic contains 1094 pages; this zoomed in view shows only a small part. In the visualization, comic pages are organized left to right, top to bottom.

Digital Formalism conference / Vienna / January 14-16

2010-01-04T09:23:00.000-08:00

Lev Manovich will present visualizations of patterns in two films by Dziga Vertov produced in collaboration with Digital Formalism project (Vienna) at the international conference Digital Formalism / Dziga Vertov. "Method left home" (January 12-14, Vienna)

The visualizations are being published on a new DVD edition of Vertov's "The Eleventh Year" and "A Sixth Part of the World" which will be presented at the conference. The DVD features new soundtracks for the films composed by Michael Nyman.

Visualizations set on Flickr

-------------------------------------
Digital Formalism / Dziga Vertov. "Method left home."

Jan 14-16, 2010, Vienna, Austria
Venues: The Austrian Film Museum and University of Vienna (Aula, Campus AAKH)

"Method has left home and started a life of its own," writes Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky in his 'epistolary novel' Zoo or letters not about love (Berlin, 1923). The conference Digital Formalism / Dziga Vertov. "Method Has Left Home." marks the end of a three-year research project that sailed under this very flag: that formalism has started a new life in the digital age and, vice versa, that the digital claims the legacy of formalist paradigms.

In confronting Vertov’s method of film making with the procedures of current computing tools, the final project conference provokes new perspectives in the area of film scholarship, introducing digital tools for media archivists and generating another level for cultural players to reflect upon their productions. At last, the project’s findings leave their original habitat to continue life in other creative environments.

About the project:
The conference represents the final event of the research project Digital Formalism: The Vienna Vertov Collection (2007 - 2010), funded by WWTF (Vienna Science and Technology Fund). The aim of this interdisciplinary cooperation between TFM - Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies at Vienna University, the Austrian Film Museum and the Institute of Software Engineering and Interactive Systems at Vienna University of Technology was to expand film formalism historically and theoretically, open up archival Vertov material for the general public and develop novel methods and computer-based tools for formal film analysis. The researchers focused on the oeuvre of the Soviet avant-garde filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1896-1954), confronting ‘traditional’ perception-based with computer-aided methods of film analysis in order to explore the typical ‘Vertovian’ devices, unravelling the complex structures of his films.

DVD-presentation:
Besides scholarly papers, a brand-new DVD edition of "The Eleventh Year" and "A Sixth Part of the World" will be presented at the conference - and international media scholars will expand the scope of the project findings further.

Conference participants:
John MacKay (Yale University), Annette Michelson (New York University), Alexander Deriabin (Moscow), Barbara Wurm (Basel/Berlin/Vienna), Julia Kursell (Berlin), Vera Kropf (Vienna University), Michael Loebenstein (Vienna), Adelheid Heftberger (Vienna), Georg Wasner (Vienna), Stavros Alifragkis (Cambridge University), Ute Holl (University of Basel), Matthias Zeppelzauer (TU Vienna), Dalibor Mitrovic (TU Vienna), Maia Zaharieva (TU Vienna), Wolfgang Beilenhoff (Weimar/Bochum), Thomas Tode (Hamburg)

The Computational Turn / March 9, 2010

2010-01-02T18:28:00.000-08:00

The forthcoming workshop on The Computational Turn in humanities which will address many of themes central to Cultural Analytics paradigm.

CFP: The Computational Turn

SWANSEA UNIVERSITY
9TH MARCH 2010

Keynote: N. Katherine Hayles (Professor of Literature at Duke University).
Keynote: Lev Manovich (Professor, Visual Arts Department, UCSD).

The application of new computational techniques and visualisation technologies in the Arts & Humanities are resulting in new approaches and methodologies for the study of traditional and new corpora of Arts and Humanities materials. This new 'computational turn' takes the methods and techniques from computer science to create new ways of distant and close readings of texts (e.g. Moretti). This one-day workshop aims to discuss the implications and applications of what Lev Manovich has called 'Cultural Analytics' and the question of finding patterns using algorthmic techniques. Some of the most startling approaches transform understandings of texts by use of network analysis (e.g. graph theory), database/XML encodings (which flatten structures), or merely provide new quantitative techniques for looking at various media forms, such as media and film, and (re)presenting them visually, aurally or haptically. Within this field there are important debates about the contrast between narrative against database techniques, pattern-matching versus hermeneutic reading, and the statistical paradigm (using a sample) versus the data mining paradigm. Additionally, new forms of collaboration within the Arts and Humanities are emerging which use team-based approaches as opposed to the traditional lone-scholar. This requires the ability to create and manage modular Arts and Humanities research teams through the organisational structures provided by technology and digital communications (e.g. Big Humanities), together with techniques for collaborating in an interdisciplinary way with other disciplines such as computer science (e.g. hard interdisciplinarity versus soft interdisciplinarity).

Papers are encouraged in the following areas:

- Distant versus Close Reading
- Database Structure versus Argument
- Data mining/Text mining/Patterns
- Pattern as a new epistemological object
- Hermeneutics and the Data Stream
- Geospatial techniques
- Big Humanities
- Digital Humanities versus Traditional Humanities
- Tool Building
- Free Culture/Open Source Arts and Humanities
- Collaboration, Assemblages and Alliances
- Language and Code (software studies)
- Information visualization in the Humanities
- Philosophical and theoretical reflections on the computational turn

+ Participation Requirements +

Workshop participants are requested to submit a position paper (approx. 2000-5000 words) about the computational turn in Arts and Humanities, philosophical/theoretical reflections on the computational turn, research focus or research questions related to computational approaches, proposals for academic practice with algorithmic/visualisation techniques, proposals for new research methods with regard to Arts and Humanities or specific case studies (if applicable) and findings to date. Position papers will be published in a workshop PDF and website for discussion and some of the participants will be invited to present their paper at the workshop.

Deadline for Position papers: February 10, 2010
Submit papers to: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tct2010

Workshop funded by The Callaghan Centre for the Study of Conflict, Power, Empire, Swansea University. The Research Institute in the Arts and Humanities (RIAH) at Swansea University.

+ References +

Clement, Tanya E. (2008) ‘A thing not beginning and not ending’: using digital tools to distant-read Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. Literary and Linguistic Computing. 23.3 (2008): 361.

Clement, Tanya, Steger, Sara, Unsworth, John, Uszkalo, Kirsten (2008) How Not to Read a Million Books. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www3.isrl.illinois.edu/~unsworth/hownot2read.html

Council on Library and Information Resources and The National Endowment for the Humanities (2009) Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub145/pub145.pdf

Hayles, N. Katherine (2009) RFID: Human Agency and Meaning in Information-Intensive Environments. Theory, Culture and Society 26.2/3 (2009): 1-24.

Hayles, N. Katherine (2009) How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://hdl.handle.net/1853/27680

Kittler, Fredrich (1997) Literature, Media, Information Systems. London: Routledge.

Krakauer, David C. (2007) The Quest for Patterns in Meta-History. Santa Fe Institute Bulletin. Winter 2007. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www.intelros.ru/pdf/SFI_Bulletin/Quest.pdf

Latour, Bruno (2007) Reassembling the Social. London: Oxford University Press.

Manovich, Lev (2002) The Language of New Media. MIT Press.

Manovich, Lev (2007) White paper: Cultural Analytics: Analysis and Visualizations of Large Cultural Data Sets, May 2007. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://softwarestudies.com/cultural_analytics/cultural_analytics_2008.doc

McLemee, Scott (2006) Literature to Infinity. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee193

Moretti, Franco (2005) Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso.

Robinson, Peter (2006) Electronic Textual Editing: The Canterbury Tales and other Medieval Texts. Electronic Textual Editing. Modern Language Association of America. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www.tei-c.org/About/Archive_new/ETE/Preview/robinson.xml

Schreibman, Susan, Siemens, Ray & Unsworth, John (2007) A Companion to Digital Humanities. London: WileyBlackwell.

Organised by Dr David M. Berry, Department of Political and Cultural Studies, Swansea University. d.m.berry@swansea.ac.uk

A Virada Computacional nas Humanidades (The Computational Turn)

2010-01-01T20:17:00.000-08:00

O Workshop "A Virada Computacional nas Humanidades" analisará diversas questões relacionadas ao tema da Analítica Cultural.

A Virada Computacional nas Humanidades

Onde: SWANSEA UNIVERSITY
Quando: dia 09 de Março de 2010

Keynote: N. Katherine Hayles (Professora de Literatura na Duke University).
Keynote: Lev Manovich (Professor de Artes Visuais na UCSD).

A aplicação de novas técnicas e tecnologias de visualização nas Artes e nas Humanidades resultaram em novas aproximações e metodologias para o estudo dos materiais recentes e tradicionais nessas áreas. Essa nova "revolução ou virada computacional" utiliza técnicas e métodos da ciência da computação para criar novas formas distanciadas ou aproximadas de leitura de textos (por exemplo Moretti). O workshop de um dia tem como objetivo discutir as implicações e aplicações do que Lev Manovich denominou "Analítica Cultural" e a questão de buscar padrões utilizando técnicas algorítmicas. Algumas das abordagens mais surpreendentes transformam a compreensão de textos através da utilização de análise das redes (por exemplo a teoria dos grafos), codificação de bancos de dados/XML (que achata as estruturas), ou meramente provê novas técnicas quantitativas para a observar várias formas de mídias, como filmes, para representa-las visualmente, foneticamente ou hapticamente. Nesse campo existem importantes debates sobre a diferença entre narrativa versus as técnicas dos bancos de dados, as correspondências de padrões versus a leitura hermenêutica e o paradigma estatístico (utilizando amostras) versus o paradigma de mineração (análise) de dados.

Além disso, novas formas de colaboração no âmbito da Artes e Humanidades estão emergindo, formas essas que utilizam abordagens baseadas em equipes em oposição às formas tradicionais baseadas no pesquisador solitário. Essa nova forma de pesquisa requer a habilidade de criar e de administrar equipes modulares de pesquisadoresnas áreas das Artes e Humanidades através das estruturas organizacionais providas pelas tecnologias e comunicações digitais, em conjunto com técnicas para colaboração de forma interdisciplinar com outras disciplinas, como as da ciência da computação (por exemplo a interdisciplinaridade dura contra a leve - hard interdisciplinarity versus soft interdisciplinarity).

Esperam-se artigos nas seguintes áreas:

- Leitura aberta versus atenta
- Estrutura do Banco de Dados versus Argumento
- Análise (Mineração) de Dados (Data mining)/Análise de Texto/Padrões
- Padrão como novo objeto epistemológico
- Hermenêutica e Transmissão de Dados
- Técnicas Geoespaciais
- Grandes Humanidades
- Humanidades Digitais versus Tradicionais
- Construção de Ferramentas
- Cultura Livre/Open Source Artes e Humanidades
- Colaboração, Colagens e Alianças
- Linguagem e Código (software studies)
- Visualização da Informação nas Humanidades
- Reflexões Teóricas e Filosóficas sobre a Revolução Computacional nas Humanidades

+ Requisitos para participação +

Os participantes do workshop estão convidados a apresentar um artigo propositivo (cerca de 2.000-5.000 palavras) sobre a revolução/virada computacional nas Artes e Humanidades, reflexões filosófico / teóricas sobre a revolução/virada computacional, sobre focos de investigação ou questões de pesquisa relacionadas a abordagens computacionais, propostas para a prática acadêmica com técnicas de visualização algorítmica, propostas de novos métodos de investigação no que diz respeito às artes e humanidades ou estudos de casos específicos (se aplicável) e os resultados obtidos até o presente momento. Os artigos serão publicados em PDF no website do workshop e alguns dos participantes serão convidados a apresentar seu trabalho presencialmente.

Deadline para envio dos artigos: 10 de Fevereiro de 2010
Envio dos artigos: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tct2010

O Workshop tem o apoio do Callaghan Centre for the Study of Conflict, Power, Empire, Swansea University e do Research Institute in the Arts and Humanities (RIAH) at Swansea University.

+ Referências Bibliográficas +

Clement, Tanya E. (2008) ‘A thing not beginning and not ending’: using digital tools to distant-read Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. Literary and Linguistic Computing. 23.3 (2008): 361.

Clement, Tanya, Steger, Sara, Unsworth, John, Uszkalo, Kirsten (2008) How Not to Read a Million Books. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www3.isrl.illinois.edu/~unsworth/hownot2read.html

Council on Library and Information Resources and The National Endowment for the Humanities (2009) Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub145/pub145.pdf

Hayles, N. Katherine (2009) RFID: Human Agency and Meaning in Information-Intensive Environments. Theory, Culture and Society 26.2/3 (2009): 1-24.

Hayles, N. Katherine (2009) How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://hdl.handle.net/1853/27680

Kittler, Fredrich (1997) Literature, Media, Information Systems. London: Routledge.

Krakauer, David C. (2007) The Quest for Patterns in Meta-History. Santa Fe Institute Bulletin. Winter 2007. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www.intelros.ru/pdf/SFI_Bulletin/Quest.pdf

Latour, Bruno (2007) Reassembling the Social. London: Oxford University Press.

Manovich, Lev (2002) The Language of New Media. MIT Press.

Manovich, Lev (2007) White paper: Cultural Analytics: Analysis and Visualizations of Large Cultural Data Sets, May 2007. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://softwarestudies.com/cultural_analytics/cultural_analytics_2008.doc

McLemee, Scott (2006) Literature to Infinity. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee193

Moretti, Franco (2005) Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso.

Robinson, Peter (2006) Electronic Textual Editing: The Canterbury Tales and other Medieval Texts. Electronic Textual Editing. Modern Language Association of America. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www.tei-c.org/About/Archive_new/ETE/Preview/robinson.xml

Schreibman, Susan, Siemens, Ray & Unsworth, John (2007) A Companion to Digital Humanities. London: WileyBlackwell.

Organizado pelo Dr. David M. Berry, Departamento de Estudos Políticos e Culturais da Swansea University. Contato: d.m.berry@swansea.ac.uk

Lithuanian translation of The Language of New Media published 12/29/2009

2009-12-29T08:40:00.000-08:00

Cultural Analytics seminar @Calit2: Software Studies, Calit2 +UCSD and University of Bergen, Dec 16-17, 2009

2009-11-30T11:42:00.000-08:00

what: cultural analytics is the use of data analysis and visualization for the study of cultural dynamics, flows, and patterns. More info

who: participants from Software studies Initiative, Calit2 (San Diego); Visual Arts Department, UCSD (San Diego); University of Bergen (Norway); Anyang University (Korea) , Mackenzie University (Sao Paulo)

where: the seminar will take place in San Diego on UCSD campus in Calit2 building.

when: December 16-17, 2009

Schedule (subject to change):

WED | DECEMBER 16, 2009
location: CALIT2 (Atkinson Hall building)

1pm-2pm: cultural analytics methods and techniques (Lev Manovich) (Calit2 conference room: 2006)
2pm - 2:30pm: HIPerSpace demo - visualization of cultural datasets (Calit2, second floor) (So Yamaoka, Manovich)
2:30pm-3:30pm: CRCA/Calit2 digital media labs tour by Todd Margolis
3:30pm-4:30pm: UCSD graduate students: Tara Zepel (via Skype), William Huber, Daniel Rehn (Calit2 conference room: 3006)
4:30pm - 6pm: software tools for cultural analytics (Manovich) (Calit2 conference room: 3006)

TH | DECEMBER 17, 2009
location: CALIT2 (Atkinson Hall building)

1pm - 1:15pm:Benjamin Bratton, UCSD+Calit2) (Calit2 conference room: 2006)
1:15pm - 2:00pm: University of Bergen grad students presentations (Calit2 conference room: 2006)
2pm -2:20pm: Kael Greco: Mapping++ (Center for Urban Ecology, Anyang University, Korea) (Calit2 conference room: 2006)
2:2:20 - 2:40pm: Eduardo Navas, UCSD (Calit2 conference room: 2006)
2:40pm - 3:00pm - 3:30pm: Jeremy Douglass (Software Studies Initiative, Calit2) (Calit2 conference room: 2006)
3:00pm - 4pm: HIPerSpace demo - visualization of cultural datasets (Jeremy Douglass, Cicero Inacio da Silva, Chanda Laine, So Yamaoka) (Calit2, second floor)
4:15pm - 6:00pm: University of Bergen grad students presentations continued (Calit2 conference room: 2004)

Take a look at the video streamed live from the seminar:

2 new powerpoints about Cultural Analytics and Software Studies

2009-11-23T23:00:00.000-08:00

Two new Powerpoint files about Cultural Analytics and Software Studies by Lev Manovich are now available:

Cultural Visualization Techniques (l0/2009). [key 10.3 MB]. [ppt 1.1 MB]

Learning from Software (11/2009). [key 1 MB]. [ppt 500 KB]

AUD $3,003,401 grant to support Cultural Analytics research

2009-11-07T16:54:00.000-08:00

Australian Research Council has awarded the grant for AUD $3,003,401 to an international group of researchers which includes Director of Software Studies Initiative Lev Manovich.

The project investigates the navigation, editing and recombination of large-scale media bases in interactive environments for industrial application in the artistic and cultural sectors. For its industrial application it will develop a prototype for the digital presentation of ZKM's seminal new media archive and museum collection and for Museum Victoria's cultural heritage collection.

Project period: 2010-2012.

Project Chief Investigators and Partner Investigators:

Professor Jeffrey Shaw (CI)
Director, iCinema Centre, UNSW

Associate Professor Dennis Del Favero (CI)
Chair, iCinema Centre, UNSW

Emeritus Professor Neil Brown (CI)
Honorary Professorial Fellow and Co-Director, iCinema Centre, UNSW

Professor Paul Compton (CI)
Head, School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW

Ms Sarah Kenderdine (PI)
Special Projects, Information Multimedia and Technology, Museum Victoria

Mr Timothy Hart (PI)
Director, Information Multimedia Technology, Museum Victoria

Professor Lev Manovich (PI)
Visual Arts Department, University of California, San Diego (UCSD)

Professor Peter Weibel (PI)
Chairman and CEO, ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe

Professor Horus Ip (PI)
Chair Professor of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong

Emeritus Professor Lewis Lancaster (PI)
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures UC Berkley,

Industry Partners
Museum Victoria, ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Australia Council for the Arts

Cultural Analytics @ Society of the Query conference in Amsterdam

2009-11-07T16:48:00.000-08:00

Lev Manovich wil lecture on Cultural Analytics at Society of the Query conference organized by Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam on November 13-14, 2009:

http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/query/

details of the presentation:

title: LEARNING FROM GOOGLE: A SEARCH ENGINE AS A METHOD FOR CULTURAL ANALYSIS

abstract: Can we translate the principles of search engine algorithms and large scale data analysis in general into a new methodology for cultural theory? In my talk I will discuss what such a methodology would look like, and also demonstrate practical examples drawn from Cultural Analytics research conducted in the Software Studies Lab at the University of California, San Diego.

new 2 year post-doc position with Software Studies / University of Bergen

2009-10-12T20:49:00.000-07:00

University of Bergen announced a 2 year Post-doc position in
collaboration with my Software Studies group at UCSD:

The post-doc will divide her/his time between Bergen and San Diego and
will work closely with me and others in my lab on Cultural Analytics
projects.
Cultural Analytics is a new methodology for cultural / media research
which uses information visualization and quantitative data analysis:

lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/09/cultural-analytics.html
www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/

Both technical people who understand cultural issues and cultural
types who can do tech are welcome to apply.

Information and application:

https://secure.jobbnorge.no/Job.aspx?jobid=61657

Note: if you get a page in Norwegian, click on "English" at the bottom
of the page to switch to English version

Startup

2009-10-05T22:43:00.001-07:00

High resolution versions of images included in the NEH Digital Startup Fall 2009 grant application "Interactive Visualization of Image Collections for Humanities Research" (Dr. Lev Manovich, UCSD).

Examples of visualizations produced using software tools developed by Software Studies initiative:

Interactive exploration of image collection on a HIPerSpace tiled display using our software prototype - zooming into an image.

4553 covers of Time magazine, 1923-2008.

Shot lengths in five reels of the film "The Eleventh Year" (Dziga Vertov, 1928).

153 paintings by Mark Rothko, organized by brightness and saturation.

Changes in Rothko's paintings average brightness over his career.

Tracing branching pathways through the 116 pages of a "Choose Your Own Adventure" gamebook.

Mapping connections between pages in Mark Danielewski's novel House of Leaves.

“Mapping the Song-Dance Sequences of Telugu Cinema”
Research poster visualizing 52 video of song-dance sequences
taken from 13 movies over the course of six decades (1950s-2000s).

Comparing interactivity in ten video games over two decades:
"Seeing How We Play" poster for the SIGGRAPH 2009 Info-Aesthetics exhibition.

Posters at Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Poster Session

2009-09-22T15:10:00.000-07:00

Colin Wheelock and Kedar Reddy just presenter their final posters at the Calit2 Summer Undergraduate poster session.

Kedar Reddy presented the poster "Mapping the Song-Dance Sequences of Telugu Cinema." The poster summarized his application of cultural analytic techniques to a collection of 52 video of song-dance sequences taken from 13 movies over the course of six decades (1950s-2000s). His visualizations included image scatterplots, dissimilarity matrices, audio classification bargraphs, hue sparklines, and other forms of information visualization. Kedar's work identified three periods of similar work, a trend towards greater diversity of form over time, and a few key outlier scenes that were highly dissimilar from the others.

Colin Wheelock presented the poster "Understanding the Game: using image processing techniques to study video game play session." The poster summaries his analysis of 10 video games over the course of three decades, focusing how extracting basic feature metrics such as motion and color from gameplay, segmenting gameplay sequences by scene or shot, classifying shots by "interactive / non-interactive" modality, and summarizing and characterizing the variability and differences of interactivity in gampeplay over genre and time.

Seminar in Brazil about Lev Manovich's theory

2009-09-21T06:26:00.000-07:00

The Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos) promoted a Special Seminar (Aula Aberta) about the work of Professor Lev Manovich. Three keynote speakers talked about Manovich's theories on New Media, Software Studies and Cultural Analytics and introduced majors ideas about his work and projects.

The Seminar was opened by Cicero Silva, coordinator of the Software Studies group in Brazil.

Video of the seminar and website:

http://aulaaberta.comdigital.info/ao-vivo/

Images

2009-09-11T19:05:00.001-07:00

Exemplary images from recent and ongoing projects.

SIGGRAPPH09 Info-aesthetics exhibition posters

2009-09-01T23:52:00.000-07:00

We completed two posters for SIGGRAPH 2009 Info-Aesthetics exhibition. The posters show some of the analytical and visualization techniques we have been developing in Software Studies lab as part of our work on Cultural Analytics. Each poster was printed at 100x60 inches.

GAMES POSTER ("HOW WE PLAY"):
design: Sergie Magdalin (UCSD undergraduate student)
data collection, analysis, visualization:
Colin Wheelock (UCSD undergraduate student; Calit2 summer 2009 undergraduate researcher)
Jeremy Douglass (Post-doctoral researcher, Software Studies Initiative, Calit2 + UCSD)

VIDEO POSTER ("MEDIA SPECIES"):
design: Sergie Magdalin (UCSD undergraduate student)
data collection, analysis, visualization:
Tara Zepel (UCSD Visual Arts PhD student)
Kedar Reddy (UCSD undergraduate student; Calit2 summer 2009 undergraduate researcher)
Lev Manovich (Director, Software Studies Initiative, Calit2 + UCSD)

Para Lev Manovich, falar em "Cibercultura" é negar a realidade

2009-08-25T12:15:00.000-07:00

"Para os acadêmicos que ainda usam o termo 'cibercultura' para falar da atualidade, eu recomendo que acordem e olhem para o que existe em volta deles".

Um dos mais importantes teóricos das novas mídias, o professor russo Lev Manovich esteve no Brasil nas últimas semanas para participar de palestras no Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica (FILE) e na Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie. Confira os melhores trechos da entrevista que ele deu ao Link:

A interatividade é um mito?

Você deve estar se referindo a declaração que eu fiz no meu livro The Language of New Media, publicado em 1999. Eu falei isso como uma reação às discussões sobre novas mídias, que na época giravam exclusivamente em torno da tal “interatividade” e se limitavam a isso. Todas as experiências culturais, no fundo, podem ser definidas como uma forma de interação. O que eu quis dizer é que toda comunicação intermediada por um computador é interativa, por isso precisávamos desenvolver termos diferentes para os diversos tipos de interatividade.

Por exemplo?

No meu livro Software Takes Command (licenciado em Creative Commons e disponível para download), eu proponho uma alternativa. Para simplificar: nós não temos que analisar os objetos concretos, e sim as interações. Devemos seguir os internautas enquanto eles navegam por um site e analisar os caminhos pelos quais andam, em vez de apenas analisar o conteúdo do site. Devemos seguir os jogadores enquanto eles estão ligados em um game. Com isso, poderemos usar a tecnologia para captar traços de personalidade e emoções das pessoas enquanto elas lêem um livro, assistem a um filme e interagem com as novas mídias.

Qual a peculiaridade da interatividade digital?

A interatividade digital, intermediada por um software, é um novo capítulo da história da cultura humana. Alguém que lê um texto não-interativo pode também construir sua própria versão dele, mentalmente. Mas isso pode ser feito de forma real nos meios digitais. Um videogame que você joga é totalmente diferente do videogame que eu jogo. A probabilidade de nos movermos pelos mesmos caminhos, passarmos pelos mesmos desafios exatamente na mesma sequência, é próxima do zero.

Você vê algum tipo de narrativa participativa que já integre totalmente seus usuários?

A dos games. Os primeiros videogames usavam o que eu chamo de “interatividade fechada”, na qual os usuários podem acessar alguns dados e outros não. A partir dos anos 90, vários artistas mudaram para uma forma diferente, a “interatividade aberta”, em que o software ou site responde diretamente às ações dos jogadores. Em jogos em 3D, por exemplo, o jogador é livre para se mover em qualquer direção no seu mundo 3D. Eles foram extremamente bem sucedidos e dominaram a indústria na década passada. Cada jogo é único.

Online e offline se tornaram a mesma coisa?

Sim. Nos anos 90, só se falava de “virtual”, “ciberespaço” e “cibercultura”. Éramos fascinados pelas possibilidades que os espaços digitais ofereciam. O “virtual”, que existe à parte do “real”, dominou a década. Agora, a web é uma realidade para milhões, e a dose diária de ‘ciberespaço’ é tão grande na vida de uma pessoa que o termo não faz mais muito sentido. O mundo alternativo tão falado na ficção cyberpunk, nos anos 80, foi perdido. O “virtual” agora é doméstico. Controlado por grandes marcas, tornou-se inofensivo. Nossas vidas online e offline são hoje a mesma coisa. Para os acadêmicos que ainda usam o termo ‘cibercultura’ para falar da atualidade, eu recomendo que acordem e olhem para o que existe em volta deles.

Entrevista publicada no jornal O Estado de S. Paulo em 21/08/2009, por Rafael Cabral.

Expressive Processing by Noah Wardrip-Fruin

2009-08-12T09:59:00.000-07:00

Noah Wardrip-Fruin has just published his first monograph, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. As the subtitle suggests, his book is a software studies take on the past and future of digital fictions and games. As of today it's available in bookstores as well as online -- and a PDF of the introduction can be downloaded from the MIT Press site.

Expressive Processing also marks the launch of the new Software Studies series from MIT Press, which Wardrip-Fruin is editing with Lev Manovich and Matthew Fuller. This book particularly develops a software studies for digital media, interpreting the computational processes of games and fictions (the ideas they embody, their histories, their potentials and limits) and connecting the specifics of these processes to the resulting audience experiences. Now that the series is launched, we encourage potential authors to contact the series editors and/or Doug Sery at MIT Press with proposals.

Lev Manovich @ Mackenzie University (Brazil)

2009-08-12T05:01:00.000-07:00

Lecture about Software Studies and Cultural Analytics, August 12, 2009, São Paulo, Brazil.
Aula Magna com Lev Manovich no Programa de Pós-graduação em Educação, Arte e História da Cultura, Universidade Mackenzie, São Paulo, Brasil.

Aula Magna com Lev Manovich (Programa de Pós-graduação em Educação, Arte e História da Cultura) from walkingtools on Vimeo.

Lev Manovich 's workshop @ FILE Labo 2009

2009-07-31T14:07:00.000-07:00

FILE Labo 2009 hosted Lev Manovich 's Cultural Analytics workshop on July 30th.
Take a look at the videos.
O FILE Labo recebeu no dia 30 de julho de 2009 o workshop do Professor e Pesquisador Lev Manovich, da Universidade da Califórnia em San Diego (UCSD), considerado um dos mais importantes pensadores da cultura e das mídias digitais na atualidade. Sua obra "The Language of New Media" (MIT Press, 2001), foi considerada a mais importante análise da história da mídia depois de Marshall McLuhan. Manovich apresentou o seu novo conceito de análise da cultura contemporânea denominado de Analítica Cultural (Cultural Analytics). Assista ao vídeo completo do workshop:

new video of Cultural Analytics software @HIPerSpace (287 megapixels)

2009-07-09T22:04:00.000-07:00

We have created a new video which showcases some of the capabilities of Cultural Analytics software running on HIPerSpace (a supervisualization system with the resolution of 35,840 x 8,000 pixels; 286,720,000 pixels total.)

The software is being developed by Software Studies Initiative and GRAVITY lab (Graphics, Visualization and Virtual Reality Laboratory) at Calit2. The development is supported by Interdisciplinary Collaboratory Grant from UCSD Chancellor office (2008-2010).

At present software allows a user to load up to 4000 images of ANY size on the HIPerSpace wall along with accompanying metadata (which can include manually entered annotations, automatic measurements of visual properties, and other information). The metadata format is a simple tab-delimited text file (so it can be prepared in Excel etc.) Using our interactive software, a user can sort image set and also make X, Y plots of any sets of metadata types. The plots can include the actual images placed over the plotted points; the size of these images can be changed at any time interactively by a user.

Because HIPerSpace is powered by a cluster of PCs, it allows for interactive performance impossible with current desktop computers or the web. Thousands of images can be scaled and graphed instantly. Therefore, HIPerSpace is a perfect platform to develop techniques for software-supported cultural analysis of large media sets.