Today people around the world create, share, and interact with billions of new digital artifacts every day. As we found in our Elsewhere project, the number of physical cultural events taking place every year increased approximately ten times between 2009 and 2018. We need new methods for seeing culture at its new scale and velocity.

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Can data science provide the answer? Although the use of computational techniques and big data has generated lots of interesting results in many research areas ranging from art history to urban studies, it is time to ask some difficult questions. Why do we approach cultural and social data today using ideas developed in the 18th and 19th century, before digital computers and big data? Can we think about cultures without categories? Can we analyze big cultural data without using numbers? I will discuss these and other questions using examples of projects I created by my lab and by other researchers. This presentation draws on the material in my new book Cultural Analytics coming from The MIT Press in 2020.

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Bio

 

Dr. Lev Manovich is one of the leading theorists of digital culture worldwide, and a pioneer in the application of data science for analysis of contemporary culture. Manovich is the author and editor of 13 books including AI Aesthetics, Theories of Software Culture, Instagram and Contemporary Image, Software Takes Command, Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database and The Language of New Media which was described as "the most suggestive and broad-ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." He was included in the list of '25 People Shaping the Future of Design' in 2013 and the list of '50 Most Interesting People Building the Future' in 2014. Manovich is a Presidential Professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Cultural Analytics Lab that pioneered analysis of visual culture using computational methods. The lab created projects for the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), New York Public Library, Google, and other clients. His latest book Cultural Analytics will be published by The MIT Press in Fall 2020.

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Register

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This is a free event requiring registration. Everybody is welcome, but we limit capacity. Faculty and students of the University of Greenwich will have priority, and the rest will be registered on a first-come-first-served basis. 

 

Participants will be invited to read, in advance, materials provided by Lev Manovich, which will be sent a day before the webinar. On Friday 3 July 2020, 11am BST (please check your time zones) we will convene a 90-minute long online discussion with Lev Manovich and two respondents with a Q&A session afterwards.

 

To register, please send a note with your name and affiliation to Emma Colthurst emma.colthurst@greenwich.ac.uk 

 

The registration is closed and the participants list finalised on Wednesday 1 July 2020.

Reading materials and Zoom access information will be sent on Thursday 2 July 2020.