Cultural Analytics

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.

Lev Manovich is Professor of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego. His book The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001) has been hailed as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan."

Introduction: How to See One Billion Images?
Part 1: Studying Culture at Scale
Chapter 1: From New Media to More Media
Chapter 2: The Science of Culture?
Chapter 3: Culture Industry and Media Analytics
Part 2: Representing Culture as Data
Chapter 4: Types of Cultural Data
Chapter 5: Cultural Sampling
Chapter 6: Metadata and Features
Chapter 7: Language, Categories, and Senses
Part 3: Exploring Cultural Data
Chapter 8: Information Visualization
Chapter 9: Exploratory Media Analysis
Chapter 10: Methods of Media Visualization
Conclusion: Can We Think Without Categories?