Nov 26, 2009

Cultural Analytics of Mark Rothko Paintings on the 287-Megapixel HIPerSpace Wall at Calit2

This is what I'd might like to use for my multi-dimensional interactive timeline project!

The interactive Cultural Analytics software system was developed by UC San Diego's Software Studies Initiative (featured in a previous post), and the Graphics, Visualization and Virtual Reality Laboratory.

Jeremy Douglass Presents Cultural Analytics on the Interactive HIperSpace Wall at Calit2


Description of Cultural Analytics, from the Software Studies Initiative Website


"The explosive growth of cultural content on the web including social media since 2004 and the digitization efforts by museums, libraries, and companies since the 1990s make possible fundamentally new paradigm for the study of both contemporary and historical cultures. We can use computer-based techniques for quantitative analysis and interactive visualization already commonly employed in sciences to begin analyzing patterns in massive cultural data sets. To make an analogy with "visual analytics," "business analytics," and "web analytics," we call this new paradigm cultural analytics."

"We believe that a systematic use of large-scale computational analysis and interactive visualization of cultural data sets and data streams will become a major trend in cultural criticism and culture industries in the coming decades. What will happen when humanists start using interactive visualizations as a standard tool in their work, the way many scientists do already? If slides made possible art history, and if a movie projector and video recorder enabled film studies, what new cultural disciplines may emerge out of the use of interactive visualization and data analysis of large cultural data sets?"


"The idea of Cultural Analytics was first presented by Lev Manovich in 2005. Software Studies Initiative founded at Calit2 in 2007 made possible to turn this vision into a research program. By drawing on the cutting-edge cyberinfrastructure and visualization research at Calit2 as well as world reputation of UCSD in digital arts and theory, we are able to develop a unique research agenda which complements other projects in digital humanities and "cyberscholarship":

  • while most projects in digital humanities deal with text, we focus on automatic analysis of visual and media cultures and artifacts: video games, visual art, media design, cinema, animation, AMV, machinema, photography, etc.;
  • in developing techniques particularly suited for cultural visualization, we draw both from visualization fields (information visualization, scientific visualization, visual analytics) and from media and digital art;
  • we are also developing techniques for analysis and visualization of born digital content such as video games, web sites and social media."
Links to white papers, scholarly papers, presentations, and photos related to this cultural visualization and related techniques/projects can be found on the UCSD Cultural Analytics web page.

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