How and why study big cultural data v2

How and why study bigvisual cultural dataDr. Lev ManovichProfessor, CUNY Graduate Centermanovich.lev@gmail.comsoftwarestudies.comFall 2012 version softwarestudies.com 1

softwarestudies.com 2

Software Studies Initiative - 2007NEH Ofﬁce for Digital Humanities - 2008NEH Humanities High Performance Computing - 2008NEH/NSF Digging Into Data competition - 2009Computational Social Science - 2009Culturnomics and Google n-gram viewer - 2010New York Times: “The next big idea in language,history and the arts? Data.”- 2010 softwarestudies.com 3

How can we take advantage of unprecedentedamounts of cultural data available on the weband digitized cultural heritage to begin analyzingcultural processes in new ways?How does computational analysis of themassive cultural datasets and real-time ﬂowscan help us to develop theories and methods inhumanities adequate for the scale and speed ofthe 21st century global networked digitalculture ? softwarestudies.com 4

NEH/NSF Digging into Data competition (2009):“How does the notion of scale affecthumanities and social science research?Now that scholars have access to hugerepositories of digitized data—far more thanthey could read in a lifetime—what does thatmean for research?” softwarestudies.com 5

Why studybig cultural data ? softwarestudies.com 6

1 study societies through the social mediatraces (social computing)2 more inclusive understanding of culturalhistory and present (using much largersamples)3 detect large scale cultural patterns softwarestudies.com 7

4 generate multiple maps of the same culturaldata sets (multiple “landscapes”)5 the best way to follow global professionallyproduced digital culture; understand newdeveloped cultural ﬁelds (“X” design)6 map cultural variability and diversity softwarestudies.com 8

Example - graph from Ted Underwood, “The Differentiation of Literaryand nonliterary diction, 1700-1900.” Data: 3,724 18th century volumes,using 10,000 most frequent words (excluding proper nouns). softwarestudies.com 10

modern (19th-20th centuries) social andcultural theory: describe what is similar(classes, structures, types) / statistics(reduction)computational humanities and social scienceshould focus on describing what is different /variability / diversity“from data to knowledge” is wrong. In thestudy of culture, we need to go from our(incomplete, biased) knowledge to actualcultural data softwarestudies.com 11

“We are no longer interested in the conformityof an individual to an ideal type; we are nowinterested in the relation of an individual to theother individuals with which it interacts...Relations will be more important thancategories; functions, which are variable, willbe more important than purposes; transitionswill be more important than boundaries;sequences will be more important thanhierarchies.”Louis Menand on Darvin, 2001. softwarestudies.com 12

Visualization: Thinkingwithout “large” categories softwarestudies.com 13

Manual De Landa:“The ontological status of assemblages, largeand small, is always that of unique, singularindividuals.”“Unlike taxonomic essentialism in whichgenus, species and individuals are separateontological categories, the ontology ofassemblages is ﬂat since it contains nothingbut differently scaled individual singularities.”source: A New Philosophy of Society. softwarestudies.com 14

Bruno Latour:“The ‘whole is now nothing more than aprovisional visualization which can bemodiﬁed and reversed at will, by moving backto the individual components, and thenlooking for yet other tools to regroup the sameelements into alternative assemblages.”source: “Tarde’s idea of quantiﬁcation.” InThe Social After Gabriel Tarde: Debates andAssessments. softwarestudies.com 15

How to study big culturalvisual data in practice?How to explore massive visual collections(exploratory media analysis)?Which data analysis and visualizationtechniques are appropriate for non-technicalusers? How to democratize data analysis? softwarestudies.com 16

Our methodology:media visualizationdisplay completecollection sorted usingmetadata and/or extractedfeatures softwarestudies.com 17

infovis: data into picturesmediavis: pictures into pictures softwarestudies.com 18

left: scatter plotright: media visualization (image plot) of the same data softwarestudies.com 19

our media visualization software on 287 megapixel display (image: 1 million manga pages)

our media visualization software on newerdisplay wall with thin bezelsdata: 4535 Time magazine covers) softwarestudies.com 21

mediavis - related research:M. Worring, G.P. Nguyen. Interactive access to largeimage collections using similarity-based visualization.Journal of Visual Languages and Computing 19 (2008)(submitted 2005).Gerald Schaefer. Interactive Browsing of ImageRepositories. ICVG 2012.Jing et al., Google Inc. Google Image Swirl: A Large-ScaleContent-Based Image Visualization System. WWW 2012. softwarestudies.com 22

mediavis vs. normalcomputer science approach:borrow techniques from media art, digital art,information visualization / for non-technical usersexplore the possibilities of simplest techniques byusing them with media collections from every areaof humanitiesuse mediavis to challenge existing concepts andassumptions of humanities softwarestudies.com 23

Basic media visualizationtechniques:1 montage: sort images using metadata2 slice: sample images and arrange usingmetadata3 image plot: automatically measure imageproperties (features) and organize in 2D usingthese measurements and metadata softwarestudies.com 25

1montage: sort imagesusing metadata4535 Time covers, 1923-2009 softwarestudies.com 26

1 montage close up: Time magazine covers, 1920s softwarestudies.com 27

1 montage close up: Time magazine covers, 1990s-2000s softwarestudies.com 28

2slice: sample images and arrange using metadata4535 Time covers, 1923-2009. Each line is a vertical slice through the center of an image. softwarestudies.com 29

Time coves slice close-up softwarestudies.com 30

3 image plot: organize images using features and(optionally) metadataImage plots of 4535 Time covers, 1923-2009. X-axis = date; Y-axis = saturation mean. softwarestudies.com 31

Time covers image plot close-up softwarestudies.com 32

Comparing a number of image sets with image plotsSelected paintings by six impressionist artists. X-axis = mean saturation. Y-axis =median hue. Megan O’Rourke, 2012. softwarestudies.com 33

visualizing videocollections:use media visualization with a set ofkeyframesautomatic selection of key frames(for example, using free shot detectionsoftware) softwarestudies.com 35

Kingdom Hearts video game62.5 hr. of game play, 29 sessions over 20 days.ys.montage: 1 frame per 3 sec (22500 frames in total) softwarestudies.com

11th Year (Dziga Vertov, 1928): ﬁrst frame of every shot softwarestudies.com

11th Year (Dziga Vertov, 1928): comparing ﬁrstand last frame in every shot (close-ups fromthe larger visualization) softwarestudies.com 40

Why use numbers?Using numbers to describecultural artifacts allows toreplacing discretecategories (words) withcontinuos descriptions(curves) softwarestudies.com 41

1 from timelines to graphs2 better represent analog attributesof cultural artifacts3 map cultural landscapes (fuzzy /overlapping / hard clusters?)4 visualize cultural variability5 discover new gropings softwarestudies.com 42

1 from timelines to curves Mark Rothko, 393 paintings (1927-1970).X - year. Y - brightness mean. Hao Wang and Mayra Vasquez. softwarestudies.com

2 better represent analog attributes of cultural artifactsNext slide:close-up of a visualization showing average amount ofvisual change (bar graph) in every shot in Vertov’s11th year. Images above the bar: ﬁrst frame of everyshot.To measure visual change per shot:1) calculate brightness mean of the difference imagebetween each two frames in the shot2) add all means3) divide by number of frames in the shot softwarestudies.com

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3 the maps of cultural landscapes reveal fuzzy andoverlapping clusters - rather than discrete categorieswith hard boundaries softwarestudies.com 46

4 visualize the space of variations600 variations of Google Logo, 1988-2009 softwarestudies.com

Studying large massivedata sets challenges ourexisting theoreticalconcepts and assumptionsexample: what is “style”? softwarestudies.com 49

image plot of one million manga pagesx - standard deviationy - entropy softwarestudies.com

distribution ofmillion manga pagesx - standard deviationy - entropy softwarestudies.com 52

single short manga series< 1000 pages softwarestudies.com 53

776 Vincent van Gogh paintings. X - year/month. Y - brightness mean. softwarestudies.com 54

Current / recent projectsat softwarestudies.com:6000+ paintings of French Impressionists7000 year old stone arrowheads(with UCSD anthropologist) softwarestudies.com 55

samples from 4.7 million newspaper pagescollection from Library of Congress (UCSDundergraduate students)virtual world / game analytics (funded by NSFEager, with UCSD Experimental Games Lab)comparing Art Now & Graphic design Flickrgroups (340,000 images)(with CS collaborator from Laurence BerkeleyNational Laboratory) softwarestudies.com 56

Big project supported by Mellon FoundationGrant, 2012-2015- tools and workﬂows for working with imageand video collections using SEASR / MEANDREdigital humanities workﬂow platform- applications:1) 1+ million images + millions of metadatarecords from deviantArt (the largest socialnetwork for user-created art - 20 M users, 240 Martworks).2) 1+ million manga pages.3) thousands of hours TV poltical news andonline video softwarestudies.com 57

Postscript:digital humanities (workingwith digitized collections ofhistorical artifacts)vs. computational humanities(using social web data) softwarestudies.com 58

“The capacity to collect and analyze massive amountsof data has transformed such ﬁelds as biology andphysics. But the emergence of a data-drivencomputational social science has been much slower.Leading journals in economics, sociology, and politicalscience show little evidence of this ﬁeld. Butcomputational social science is occurring in Internetcompanies such as Google and Yahoo, and ingovernment agencies such as the U.S. NationalSecurity Agency.”“Computational Social Science.” Science, vol. 323, no.6, February 2009. softwarestudies.com 59

Massive amounts of cultural content and onlineconversations, opinions, and cultural activities(general and specialized social media networks;personal and professional web sites ).This data offers us unprecedented opportunities tounderstand cultural processes and their dynamicsand develop new concepts and models which can bealso used to better understand the past.Currently only analyzed by Google, Facebook,YouTube, Blueﬁn labs, Echonest, and othercompanies, and computer scientists working in“social computing”- not yet by humanists. softwarestudies.com 60

manovich.lev@gmail.comsoftwarestudies.com softwarestudies.com 61

Our free open source software tools foranalyzing and visualizing large image andvideo collections, publications andprojects:softwarestudies.comThe tools run on Mac, PC, Unix.All media visualizations in this presentationwere created by members of Software softwarestudies.com 62

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How and why study big cultural data v2

by Lev Manovich on Dec 08, 2012

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