Cultural Analytics

Book Description A book at the intersection of data science and media studies, presenting concepts and methods for computational analysis of cultural data.

How can we see a billion images? What analytical methods can we bring to bear on the astonishing scale of digital culture--the billions of photographs shared on social media  every day, the hundreds of millions of songs created by twenty million musicians on Soundcloud, the content of four billion Pinterest boards? In Cultural Analytics, Lev Manovich presents concepts and methods for computational analysis of cultural data. Drawing on more than a decade of research and projects from his own lab, Manovich offers a gentle, nontechnical introduction to the core ideas of data analytics and discusses the ways that our society uses data and algorithms.

Content

I - Studying Culture at Scale
1. From New Media to More Media
2. The Science of Culture?
3. Culture Industry and Media Analytics

II - Representing Culture as Data
4. Types of Cultural Data
5. Cultural Sampling
6. Metadata and Features
7. Language, Categories, and Senses

III - Exploring Cultural Data
8. Information Visualization
9. Exploratory Media Analysis
10. Methods of Media Visualization