How to do Digital Humanities Right?

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Visualizations comparing appr. 50,000 Intagram photos uploaded in NYC over a few days in Spring 2012 (top) with the the same number of Instagram photos uploaded in Tokyo (bottom) during the same period. Photos are organized by upload time, left to right.


My presentation at Digital Humanities revisited conference, Herrenhausen Palace,
Hanover/Germany, December 6, 2013:

1. Explorative visualization


don’t start with research questions

2. Show the whole collection

against search

3. Digital humanities - without quantification

no counting (visualize using metadata)

4. Digital humanities - without metadata

no metadata (visualize using only features)

5. Seeing change

not “from data to knowledge,” but from 'knowledge' to data

6. Creative sampling / remapping

making our perceptions strange (trying to forget what we think we know)



7. Computational analysis + visualization

leaving prison-house of language




Open to academics, programmers, visualization designers: Distinguished Fellowships in Digital Humanities at The Graduate Center, City University of New York

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Apply for 2014-2015 Distinguished Fellowships at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

This is open not only to academics (with Ph.D., any level) but also to people doing Digital Humanities related work (programming, visualization, journalism, etc.) 

Note: Deadline for applications was extended November 13.



The Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) of the Graduate Center, City University of New York, invites applicants for Distinguished Fellowships in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Theoretical Sciences for the 2014 – 2015 academic year. Applicants should have outstanding records of published research and scholarship. For the academic year 2014-2015, preference will be given to scholars working in the areas of Immigration, Inequality and the Digital Humanities.

Distinguished Fellows are provided with office space, a computer, and access to the Graduate Center’s academic infrastructure. Depending on their category of membership (see below), they will also receive either a stipend or teaching release. In return, they are expected to carry out their work regularly at the Graduate Center, which is located in Midtown at 365 Fifth Avenue, and to participate in the intellectual and academic community of ARC and the Graduate Center. In practice, this means using their office on a regular basis, attending ARC events, giving presentations to a seminar and/or a public audience, sharing work-in-progress with doctoral students and mentoring them in a research praxis seminar and individual sessions organized for this purpose.

Distinguished Visiting Fellows: for scholars and researchers who are not employed by the City University of New York. A Distinguished Visiting Fellow will receive a stipend of $72,000 for two semesters or $36,000 for one semester.

Fellowships are also available for CUNY faculty.


For more information and application forms please visit the application website:

http://www.gc.cuny.edu/Degrees-Research/The-Advanced-Research-Collaborative/ARC-Applications


The deadline for applications is November 13, 2013. 

Notification of acceptance will be sent by January 31, 2014.

Exhibition opening: "The Aggregate Eye: 13 cities / 312,694 people / 2,353,017 photos"

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Nadav Hochman, Lev Manovich, Jay Chow. "33,292 photos shared on Instagram in Tel Aviv during April 22-26, 2012." Digital image rendered with custom software.

Nadav Hochman, Lev Manovich, Jay Chow 

The Aggregate Eye: 13 cities / 312,694 people / 2,353,017 photos 

Exhibition at Amelie A. Wallace Gallery

Curated by Hyewon Yi and Alise Tifentale

October 29 – December 5, 2013

Opening reception: October 29, 4 – 7pm

Lecture by Lev Manovich: “From Atget to Instagram: Representing the City”

Followed by a panel discussion with Lev Manovich, Nadav Hochman, Alise Tifentale, and Hyewon Yi

October 29, 7 – 8pm

See the exhibited works online: http://phototrails.net/exhibition/

Maps, photographs, and cinema are the principal technologies that individuals, small groups, and businesses traditionally have used to represent cities. Today, urban representations can be created by hundreds of millions of ordinary people who capture and share photos on social networks. If we were to aggregate these masses of photos, how would our cities look? How unique are the photos captured by each of us? Are there dominant themes regardless of location?

The Aggregate Eye, a project created by Nadav Hochman, Lev Manovich, and Jay Chow, investigates these questions. The collaborators downloaded and analyzed 2,353,017 Instagram photos shared by 312,694 people in thirteen cities over a three-month period. The large prints and video included in the exhibition combine these photos to reveal unique patterns. One set of images compares New York, Tokyo, and Bangkok using 150,000 Instagram photos. Another image, created by 53,498 photos taken in Tokyo over several days, depicts a gradual progression from day to night activities. A visualization of 23,581 photos shared in Brooklyn during Hurricane Sandy captures the dramatic narrative of that day.

This exhibition is a part of the Phototrails project, initiated by Hochman, Manovich, and Chow to investigate patterns in social media user-generated photography and video. The Atlantic Cities, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, and Wired have reported on the project.

Artist and Panelist Biographies:

Lev Manovich is world-renowned innovator in digital humanities and theorist of digital culture and media art. His global reputation in digital humanities stems from the tremendous impact of his 2001 book,The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001), which has been translated into ten languages. His most recent book, Software Takes Command was published this summer (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). He is Professor of Computer Science at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Director of the Software Studies Initiative. Manovich’s art projects have been presented at ICA, Centre Pompidou, The Walker Art Center, Chelsea Art Museum, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwangju Design Biennale, and Graphic Design Museum (Breda, NL). 

Nadav Hochman is a doctoral student in the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh and a visiting scholar at the Software Studies Initiative at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His research focuses on the use of computational methods for analysis of massive online visual cultural data sets. He holds master’s degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and the Interdisciplinary Program of the Arts at Tel Aviv University. Hochman was a visiting researcher at the Museum of Modern Art and is an Andrew Mellon Research Fellow (2013-2014).

Jay Chow is a recent graduate of the University of California San Diego with a BFA in Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts. He is a researcher at the Software Studies Initiative at Calit2, where he develops tools for the analysis and visualization of large image and video collections for the humanities. 

Alise Tifentale, a doctoral student in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, is an art historian, editor, writer, and curator whose interests include the history of photography as art and new media aesthetics. In 1996, Tifentale co-founded E-Lab (now called RIXC), the first new media arts activist group in Riga, Latvia. She co-curated the Latvian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennial (2013), and is the author of The Photograph as Art in Latvia, 1960-1969 (Riga: Neputns, 2011).

Hyewon Yi, Director of the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, has been curating exhibitions at the Gallery regularly since 2006. Having served previously as an adjunct instructor, she joined the faculty of the Visual Arts Department at SUNY College at Old Westbury as a full-time lecturer in Fall 2013, where she teaches History of Photography, New Media Art, and Introduction to the Arts. Yi earned her PhD in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York in May 2013.

Amelie A. Wallace Gallery

SUNY College at Old Westbury, Old Westbury, New York 11568

Directions: http://www.oldwestbury.edu/about/directions.cfm

Hours: Monday - Thursday, 12 – 5pm, and by appointment

Exhibition walkthroughs with gallery director Hyewon Yi:

Monday, November 11, 1pm and Wednesday, December 4, 11am

Gallery contact: Hyewon Yi, yih@oldwestbury.edu.

Rare chance to hear the legendary Larry Smarr speaking in New York

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Dr. Larry Smarr, the Director of Calit2 (California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology) will speak on Digital Culture and the Future Internet 

http://centerforthehumanities.org/events/Digital-Culture-and-the-Future-Internet

Location:

CUNY The Graduate Center,
Room C205,
365 Fifth Avenue, New York

Date and time: October 30, 6pm.

California Institute for Telecommunication and Information (Calit2) develops next generation of information technologies, including optical networks, information visualization, and global telepresence. Under Smarr's leadership, Calit2 also supports a wide range of innovative projects in digital humanities and in digital art. In these projects, humanists and artists collaborate with scientists to explore potential of new technologies which will not become widely available for another 10-15 years. 

One example of this is the work of our Software Studies Initiative, which was started at Calit2 in 2007 (Since 2013, we also have a location in NYC at The Graduate Center CUNY). Dr. Smarr made possible for us to collaborate with the research labs at Calit2 developing next generation super-visualization displays, such as 287 megapixel HIPerspace. Together we developed an application which allows interactive visualization of thousands of images on such display. 

Dr. Larry Smarr is a world leader leader in scientific computing, supercomputer applications, and Internet infrastructure. He has been directing Calit2 since its founding in 2000. 


This lecture is a part of CUNY Digital Humanities Fall 2013 lecture series. All lectures are free and open to the public. 

Software Takes Command: conversation with Lev Manovich, Christiane Paul, Paul D. Miller and Katie Torn, Nov 6, Eyebeam NYC

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Software Takes Command: Conversation with Lev Manovich, Christiane Paul, Paul D. Miller and Katie Torn.


Eyebeam, 540 W 21st St. New York.
Wednesday November 6, 2013.
6-8 pm.


Join Eyebeam for a discussion on software’s influence on design, art, data and culture. How do software tools shape the visual aesthetics of contemporary media and design? What motivated developers in the 1960s and ‘70s to create the concepts and techniques that now underlie contemporary applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Final Cut? What happens to the idea of a “medium” after previously media-specific tools have been simulated and extended into software?

Lev Manovich (CUNY Graduate Center) will discuss key ideas from his new book Software Takes Command (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Christiane Paul will talk about software art's aesthetics and poetics, as well as its position within art history and the artworld at large. Paul D. Miller (D.J. Spooky) will present his forthcoming book The Imaginary App - an anthology of art and scholarship on app-computing co-authored by Svitlana Matviyenko. Artist and Eyebeam Fellow Katie Torn will talk about her her transition from traditional art and illustration to working in a complete 3D Maya-generated environment. This talk is held in tandem with Katie Torn’s exhibition Dream House, currently on view in the Eyebeam Storefront.


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Image above: Miltos Manetas, "Girls in Nike." 2005.

Voy a hablar en la conferencia de Santiago, Lunes 19 de agosto

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Voy a hablar en la conferencia de Santiago

Lunes 19 de agosto / GAM [Av. Libertador Bernardo O’Higgins 227, Santiago]




II ENCUENTRO NACIONAL DE NUEVOS MEDIOS
Visualidades [datos, colecciones, archivos].
Nuevos humanismos en la politización de la imagen.

Fecha: 19, 20 y 21 de agosto, 2013.

Sedes: GAM + FAU Universidad de Chile + Mil M2.

programa de la Conferencia:

http://estudiosvisualesynuevosmedios.uchilefau.cl/encuentro/programa/Programa_IIENNM_2013.pdf

Up to 40 travel grants for young researchers to participate in Herrenhausen Conference on Digital Humanities, 12/2013, Germany

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(DIGITAL) HUMANITIES REVISITED – CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE DIGITAL AGE

December, 5-7, 2013, Herrenhausen Palace, Hanover


Full Conference program

Confirmed participants include: Lawrence Lessig, Julia Flanders, Jeffrey Schnapp, Horst Bredekamp, Lev Manovich, Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Peter Weibel.


TRAVEL GRANTS INFO

http://www.volkswagenstiftung.de/veranstaltungen/veranstaltungskalender/veranstaltungsseite/digitalhumanities/travel-grants-information-and-application.html

The Volkswagen Foundation offers up to 40 Travel Grants for young researchers who wish to attend the conference.

One project – three slides – three minutes!

Our objective is to present new research questions and / or new methodological or technological approaches arising from digital humanities and by this challenging the traditional humanist perspective. The question is: What specific value does your project add to the digital humanities?

Presentation and Poster

Recipients of the travel grants are required to present their project in a three minutes "Lightening Talk" as well as on a poster in a poster session. Powerpoint, etc. can be used, but limit yourself to max. three slides. Every presenter has only three minutes to present his / her project.

Application Details

As a general rule, researchers eligible for the travel grant are Ph.D. students, Postdocs or Assistant Professors.

Applicants are required to apply until August 15, 2013. We are not able to consider applications after this deadline.

Apply by submitting the following documents (link: Travel Grant Application):

1. An abstract of the project you want to present (max. 2.200 characters including spaces).

2. A short text (1.000 characters) that explains what specific value your project adds to the digital humanities framework and argues why we should select your project.

3. A short C.V. of max. 1.000 characters (including spaces).

We will inform the applicants about the results by Mid-September 2013. If your application has been accepted, the VolkswagenStiftung will book a room for you and send you all necessary information regarding poster sizes, deadlines, travel, accommodation, and visa.

Please, only register for the conference beforehand if you plan to visit the conference regardless of your application’s acceptance.

new book by Lev Manovich is coming out on July 4: press release and publication details

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Book web page: www.manovich.net/softbook

Twitter: #softbook








FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Wednesday, June 5, 2013
CONTACT: Katy Otto, 240.478.9387 or katyotto@gmail.com


New Media Expert Lev Manovich Announces Releases First Book Offering a Detailed Analysis of Software We Use Daily



New Book, Software Takes Command, To Come Out July 4

New York, NY – Lev Manovich, acclaimed new media expert and Professor of Computer Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, will release his latest work Software Takes Command on July 4, 2013.

Published by Bloomsbury Academic, this new book from the celebrated author of The Language of New Media is the first to offer a rigorous analysis of the technology we all use daily - software for media authoring, access, and sharing. What motivated developers in the 1960s and ‘70s to create the concepts and techniques that now underlie contemporary applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Final Cut? How do these tools shape the visual aesthetics of contemporary media and design? What happens to the idea of a “medium” after previously media-specific tools have been simulated and extended into software? Does “media” still exist?Lev Manovich answers these questions through detailed analysis of key media applications such as Photoshop and After Effects, popular web services such as Google Earth, and milestone projects in design, motion graphics, and interactive environments. Software Takes Command is a must for technologists, designers, artists and researchers concerned with contemporary media and digital culture.


In addition to soft cover, hard cover, and e-book, the complete book will be available as free download under Creative Commons License.

For media inquiries, including interview requests and review copies, contact Katy Otto at (240) 478-9387 or katyotto@gmail.com.

For speaking inquiries, contact Miki Oda at miki.oda2@gmail.com



Endorsements of Software Takes Command:

"Computers haven't transformed media--they've shattered the very idea of a medium. Lev Manovich connects the dots of software society, from layers in Photoshop to layers of data, interpretation, and meaning.” Martin Wattenberg, Software Artist and Scientist.

"Lev Manovich is the only media theorist around who is talking not just about what computers do but how they do it. In search of mass media’s “Velvet Revolution,” Manovich peers behind the black curtain of software. There he discovers the hybrid languages and slippery workflows that drive today’s ubiquitous mix of animation, typography, design, and live action." Ellen Lupton, Curator of Contemporary Design, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

"Through a theoretical analysis of the computer as cultural metamedium and a probing history of 'media software' such Photoshop and After Effects, among others, this is essential reading for anyone interested in how software has changed how we work, create, and perceive the world." Tanya Clement, Assistant Professor, School of Information at the University of Texas, Austin.

"This long-researched book, which synthesizes critical theory, human-computer interaction, and media history as well as newer approaches from the digital humanities, allows software to take its place as a commanding element in our conversations about computers, and how we work, play, learn, and create." Matthew Kirschenbaum, Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland.


ISBN numbers:

Hardcover: 9781623568177
Softcover: 9781623567453
ePub: 9781623562618


Lev Manovich is Professor of Computer Science at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, Director of the Software Studies Initiative (www.softwarestudies.com) at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, and Visiting Professor at European Graduate School. His earlier book The Language of New Media was described as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." Read more about Lev and his work at www.manovich.net or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/manovich. For more on Software Takes Command, visit www.manovich.net/softbook.

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Conference on Digital Humanities in St. Petesburg, Russia, October 3-5, 2013

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CULTURAL RESEARCH IN THE CONTEXT OF «DIGITAL HUMANITIES»

International Conference (working languages: English and Russian)

Place: Saint-Petersburg, Russia

Dates: October 3-5, 2013

Organized by: Russian State Herzen University www.herzendigitalhumanities.ru

Detailed information about the conference, and how to submit papers.

Visualizing Image & Video Collections workshop by Lev Manovich, The Graduate Center CUNY, April 24, 2013

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Examples of visualizations created with the tooks shown in the workshop:

Visualizing image and video collections: Examples from Lev Manovich

Visualizing Image & Video Collections workshop

instructor:
Lev Manovich, Professor (digital humanities and computers science), The Graduate Center CUNY

data/time:
Wednesday, April 24th 2013. 6:00-9:00pm

location: Room 6418, The Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, New York.


This workshop will cover recently developed visualization techniques for exploring image and video collections of any size – from a few dozens to millions of images. We will use open source free ImageJ software with the custom tools developed in Lev Manovich’s lab (softwarestudies.com). The techniques have already been used in variety of fields, including art history, film and media studies, digital culture studies, game studies, and linguistics. The participants will also be introduced to digital image processing – the use of computers to automatically analyze images.

Note: For students who wish to bring their own computers to the workshop, ImageJ runs on Macs, PCs and Lunix.
Download link: http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/download.html



Sample data sets to be used in workshops - download link (Dropbox folder)


Separate links to our ImageJ visualization macros (included in the sample data set download):

ImagePlot

ImageMontage

ImageSlice


Documentation:

GUIDE TO VISUALIZING VIDEO AND IMAGE SEQUENCES | How to prepare images and video collections for visualization; use of ImageJ built-in commands and our custom plug-ins.

ImagePlot user guide


Theory and methodology articles about visualizing image and video collection from softwarestudies.com

IEEE BIGDATA 2013: WORKSHOP ON BIG HUMANITIES

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The Workshop on Big Humanities will be held in conjunction with the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2013, 6-9 October 2013, San Francisco, California). The conference provides a leading international forum for disseminating the latest research in the growing field of “big data”.

The workshop will address applications of “big data” in the humanities, arts and culture, and the challenges and possibilities that such increased scale brings for scholarship in these areas.


Topics covered by the workshop include, but are not restricted to, the following:

Text- and data-mining of historical and archival material.
Social media analysis, including sentiment analysis
Cultural analytics
Crowd-sourcing and big data
Cyber-infrastructures for the humanities
Relationship between ‘small data’ and big data
NoSQL databases and their application, e.g. document and graph databases
Big data and the construction of memory and identity
Big data and archival practice
Construction of big data
Big data in Heritage



July 30, 2013: submission of full workshop papers

Other dates and submission details here.

"The End of Cinema and the Future of Cinema Studies" conference, 4/12/2003

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Lev Manovich will be speaking about visualizing cinema at The End of Cinema and the Future of Cinema Studies conference, 4/12/2003, Philadelphia

Pixelated Politics: Still and Moving Images in the Digital Age, Graduate Center CUNY, April 9, 6:30pm

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Pixelated Politics: Still & Moving Images in the Digital Age
Mariam Ghani, Lev Manovich, Nick Mirzoeff, Christiane Paul, Natalie Musteata, McKenzie Wark

date: Apr 9, 2013, 6:30pm

location: Martin E. Segal Theatre,
The Graduate Center, The City University of New York (CUNY).
365 5th Ave New York, NY

Participants: Mariam Ghani, artist and writer; Lev Manovich, Digital Humanities, The Graduate Center, CUNY; Nicholas Mirzoeff, Media, Culture and Communication, New York University; Christiane Paul, Media Studies, The New School, and New Media Arts at The Whitney Museum of American Art; McKenzie Wark, Culture and Media, The New School.

Organized and moderated by Natalie Musteata, Art History, The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Cosponsored by the PhD Program in Art History and the Certificate Program in Film Studies.


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Illustration: Christian Giordano’s Tagged Color visualization of Flickr images and tags



"If an image is tagged “summer,” what colors do you expect? What images come to mind with the word “magenta?” What colors are people compelled to photograph? Christian Giordano’s Tagged Color visualization explores these questions and more. By mapping the user-supplied color field data and the most popular correlating tags, this visualization shows fascinating trends in the obsession with color. As you’d expect, “winter” retrieves a palette of blues, grays, and ebony; friendly purple correlates well with other colors; green’s the most-tagged color; and lonely cyan is always reported correctly, but doesn’t correlate well to any particular photo subject. Even in this age of RGB, the sky is blue on Flickr." [source: http://onemansblog.com/2011/01/14/5-impressive-flickr-visualizations/]

our ImagePlot software is used in #OCCUPYDATA NYC Hackaphon

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Image plot of almost 400 OccuPrint posters organized by visual similarity.


"In addition, we’ve a human pattern recognition task underway in the gallery... it appears that gallery visitors are using the same types of features to understand and visualize patterns in the OccuPrint poster set. However, one distinction is incredibly striking, speed. Relative to computer efficiency, human work feels more like geologic time."



#OCCUPYDATA NYC is a series of Hackathons taking place in NYC. (The next one is on April 22nd, 2013. 8pm. Kellen Auditorium @ The New School, 66 Fifth Avenue).

During the last hackthon which took place at The Graduate Center CUNY, the participants used our free software tool ImagePlot to analyze and visualize a collection of almost 400 Occuprint posters. (Occuprint "collects, prints and distributes posters from the worldwide Occupy movement.")

"Occuprint Image Analysis" results and visualizations are available here:

Occuprint Image Analysis



ImagePlot software download and documentation:

http://lab.softwarestudies.com/p/imageplot.html

Theorizing the Web 2013 (#TtW13) Conference, March 1-2, The Graduate Center, CUNY

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Visitors flow for softwarestudies.com (Google Analytics screen grab)


Theorizing the Web 2013 (#TtW13) Conference

Saturday, March 1-2
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

Conference program:

http://justpublics365.commons.gc.cuny.edu/events/ttw13-conference/


I am speaking at Memory and the Speed of Data | Room C | #c1 session, Saturday May 2, 11:00am-12:15pm.

Mary Flanagan 4:00pm-5:30pm, Room C204-205, CUNY Graduate Center

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Thursday February 28:

Mary Flanagan

“Never Mind the Body, Here’s a Gamepad? Considering Embodiment in The Age of Play”

4:00pm-5:30pm, Room C204-205, CUNY Graduate Center,
365 5th Ave, New York.


Sponsored by the English Student Association, Doctoral Students’ Council, GC Digital Initiatives, and CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative.

Opening keynote for Minding the Body: Dualism and its Discontents, an interdisciplinary conference hosted by the English Student Association at CUNY Graduate Center.

This keynote presentation explores a pervasive onscreen/offscreen split of identification and the body in what we could now call The Age of Play. Citing examples from artists’ work and popular culture, with a focus on games, Flanagan leads the audience on an investigation of current trends that are in diametrical opposition: on the one hand, a hunger for embodied, resonant experience; and on the other, a desire for control for the body, a recurring motif in fields from psychology to public health, manifesting in plastic surgery and digital manipulation of the body.

Mary Flanagan is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College and Director of Tiltfactor Laboratory. She writes at Grand Text Auto; see also her work on Values at Play.

OS XXI: Art’s Digital Future panel, Feb. 13 (today) The Graduate Center, CUNY

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OS XXI: Art’s Digital Future

Panel discussion

Martin E Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center

12.30-2pm, 13 February 2013

Speakers:

Paul Chan is an artist, who founded the press Badlands Unlimited in 2010. Badlands’ latest book is Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews by Calvin Tomkins, available as an enhanced e-book on Apple iBooks and Amazon Kindle and IRL at all fine independent bookshops.

Brian Droitcour is a critic and curator, and a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature at NYU. He writes frequently on new media art.

Lev Manovich is Professor of Computer Science at CUNY Graduate Center, whose research focuses on visualizing massive image sets including painting, film and user generated art. His publications include The Language of New Media (2001) and Software Takes Command (2013).

Virginia Rutledge is an art advisor and lawyer focused on contemporary art and intellectual property. A Graduate Center alum, she has also been a curator (LACMA), corporate litigator (Cravath) and nonprofit VP and general counsel (Creative Commons).

Chaired by Claire Bishop, Associate Professor in the PhD Program in Art History, CUNY Graduate Center.


The art market still revolves around artefacts produced as one-offs or in limited editions, and which still bear the traces of the artist’s hand – in the form of signatures, certificates of authentication, or customized dvd presentation boxes. At the same time, we increasingly consume art digitally – via search engine queries, online databases, gallery websites, our own photographic documentation, or on ubu.web. How is the digital revolution affecting the production and dissemination of art? What opportunities does the internet afford a younger generation of curators, researchers and critics? And finally, are we making too much of the digital as a rupture – or can it be placed in a continuity with earlier developments in reproductive technology (photography, film, video)?

Sponsored by the Ph.D. in Art History, CUNY Graduate Center, and supported by the Sally and Nick Webster Art History Fund.

THE PUBLIC PRIVATE exhibition curated by Christiane Paul, Feb. 6 opening

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THE PUBLIC PRIVATE

Sheila C. Johnson Design Center
 Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery

2 W 13th St., NY, NY 10011

February 7 - April 17, 2013

Opening reception: Wednesday, February 6, 6:00 - 8:00 pm

The Public Private explores the impact of social media and new technologies on the relationship between the public and private realm. The artworks brought together in The Public Private address these issues from psychological, legal, and economic perspectives and use strategies ranging from hacking to self-surveillance to reflect upon the profound changes in our understanding of identity, personal boundaries, and self-representation.

Works on view include Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico’s Face to Facebook, a multimedia installation of one million Facebook profiles, which were “appropriated” by the artists, filtered using facial-recognition software, and then posted on a custom-made dating website sorted by facial expressions. Eva and Franco Mattes’ The Others is a video installation composed of 10,000 photos the Mattes have acquired through a software glitch that gives remote access to personal computers. The core of the work is not just the presentation of these images, but the act of “stealing” and moving them from the private into the public realm.

Other artists and works represented in the gallery include Jill Magid’s Evidence Locker, Luke Dubois’ Missed Connections, Wafaa Bilal’s 3rdi, Carlo Zanni’s Self Portrait with Friends, James Coupe's Panoptic Panorama #2: Five People in a Room, Paolo Cirio’s Street Ghosts, and Ben Grosser’s Facebook Demetricator.


The Public Private is curated by Christiane Paul, an Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School and Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The Chronicle of Higher Education coverage of Lev Manovich and softwarestudies.com

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Exibition of our visualization at Graphic Museum (Netherlands), 2010.


Alisha Azevedo. Leading Digital-Humanities Researcher Is Drawn From California to New York.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 3, 2012.


"A leading digital-humanities researcher known for his sweeping digital visualizations will leave his long-held professorship in January for a new position at the City University of New York's Graduate Center."

"Mr. Manovich will teach a course on big data, visualization, and the digital humanities in the spring with the goal of introducing students in the digital-humanities master's program and Ph.D. students from all backgrounds to the field and exposing them to different visualization tools."

"He will also expand the Software Studies Initiative he founded in 2007 within the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at the San Diego campus by adding offices at the Graduate Center, and he will continue working with San Diego researchers who are creating next-generation digital-visualization systems at the lab. "

"Mr. Manovich plans to continue expanding the scope of his research and has an interest in examining how digital design changes over time. "We're just getting started," he says."

Software Studies Initiative is expanding: New York + San Diego

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CUNY Graduate Center buiding, 361 Fifth Ave, New York City. Build in 1865.


Calit2 building, La Jolla, CA. Built in 2005.


View Larger Map
Graduate Center location in NYC.


As some people already know, I am moving to CUNY Graduate Center in January 2013. I will be a Professor in graduate computer science program. I am looking forward to working with faculty and students in CUNY program on developing further cultural analytics methods, tools, and projects.

CUNY Graduate Center is making serious investments in building digital humanities, including grants, events, research programs, workshops, etc. My first course to be offered in Winter 2012 is Big Data, Visualization, and Digital Humanities, and its open to both students in MA program in digital humanities, and PhD students in all departments.

Here are the links to some of the many digital initiatives and events at CUNY Graduate Center:

JustPublics@365 - reimagining scholarly communication for the public good

Craduate Center Digital Initiatives

Theorizing the Web 2013 conference

Digital media programs at CUNY


We will also continue collaborate with California Institute for Telecommunication and Information (Calit2) and their labs and scientists developing next generation visualization systems. Software studies inittiative will have offices both in NYC at CUNY, and in San Diego at Calit2.

if you are interested to study with me at CUNY, I have funding to support two new PhD students for 5 years (125K per student). To be considered for Fall 2013 admission, send me one page proposal by Dec 1, 2012.


Press release:

RENOWNED DIGITAL HUMANITIES EXPERT LEV MANOVICH JOINING GRADUATE CENTER FACULTY