"Software, Globalization and Political Action" course co-taught by Manovich and Buck-Morss, Spring 2014, Graduate Center CUNY

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#softclassgc (class Twitter hashtag)


SYLLABUS (Google Doc updated throughout the semester - we suggest you check it every weekend to see the updates)


Readings (Dropbox)







Top: a frame from A Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov, 1929.
Bottom: Visualization of locations of large number of photos in NYC shared on Flickr, from "Locals and Tourists" by Erik Fisher, 2009).


Spring 2013 course: Software, Globalization, and Political Action

Co-taught by Susan Buck-Morss (Political Science) and Lev Manovich (Computer Science). The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY)

Tuesdays 2-4pm.
4 Credits. Cross-listed in the Programs in Political Science, Computer Science and Art History.



Description:

This interdisciplinary seminar will explore concepts and methods from both critical theory and software studies. It is taught by Prof. Susan Buck-Morss (Political Science), and Prof. Lev Manovich (Computer Science).

We will cover three themes:

1) Vision and Image - From Walter Benjamin and Dziga Vertov to computer vision, Google Earth, Adobe Creative Suite, and Instagram: new strategies of seeing and representation in modern and software societies. Image v. Concept (Hegel against ‘picture thinking’) Image and historical matter (Benjamin on the “dialectical image”). Aesthetics and Politics: Images as a (trans-local) language for political action; vision and democracy: the “ethical turn.” Digital Image Processing and Computer Vision and examples of their application in creative industries, vernacular digital photography, and digital humanities.

2) Data and Knowledge - Knowledge production in the age of "big data." Images as sources of knowledge. Political critique of methods (positivism, abstraction, categorical givens) and goals (surveillance, marketing, positivism). Knowledge of, by and for whom? Data science as the new key technology for production of knowledge and decision making in big data societies. Data visualization as a research method in humanities and social sciences (including art history and political science). From representing reality to representing data. Data art.

3) Crowds and Networks - What are the new forms of sociality and political action enabled by global networks? Networked Images as political instruments. Crowds and the de-centered brain. Crowds and/as a medium of global political action since the Arab Spring. The new body politic as a body without skin. Social networks and computational social science. Social media analytics. Artistic visualizations of social data.

We are hiring: Computer Vision researcher position (freelance - you don't need to move)

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Visualization of 23,581 photos taken during 24 hours in Brooklyn area. See http://phototrails.net/instagram-cities/



We are a digital humanities research lab (www.softwarestudies.com) at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). We are working on analyzing and visualizing cultural patterns in large sets of images and video. The examples of our projects include analysis/visualization of 2.3 million Instagram photos, 1 million manga pages, and all paintings of Vincent van Gogh.

We started this research in 2007, and we call it cultural analytics.


We are looking for a Computer Vision researcher to join us (freelance working remotely, or full-time).

You can live anywhere (as long as you have US social security number) and work freelance, choosing your own hours. So if you already have a full-time position, but have some free time, this job is for you. (Email, Skype or Google Hangout - we love them all). This freelance position is available for up to 1 year.

Or, if you happen to live in San Diego (where our lab is located) and prefer to work full-time (with benefits), this position is available for up to 2 years.


Duties:

So far, we only used low-level visual features in our projects, and we want to go further - with your help:

You will use appropriate computer vision techniques to analyze visual characteristics and content of large sets of user-captured photographs from media sharing sites. Specifically:

1) You will use state of the art scene classification methods to automatically classify large sets of photographs from media sharing sites. [1 - See examples below]

2) Photo classification for a few selected object types that can be identified with high accuracy (such as faces / figures). [2 - see reference for current state of the art in objects classification task].

3) Analysis of visual attributes such as color, lines, shapes, composition. (We will use them not only as input to (2) and (3) but also for visualizing visual patterns over time, and the differences between image sets.)


In addition to photographs, you will also work on analyzing cultural images such as paintings, comics, or magazine covers and pages. The goal is to implement features which can capture stylistic evolution in image sets (for , all works by an artist, or all pages in a magazine over a number of years.) [3 - see examples below]

You can use any software (OpenCV, Matlab, etc.).

The analysis does not need to run in real-time.

Some photo sets may have EXIF data and other capture metadata; others may have only titles and tags; still others may only have even less data associated with them.

Note that our goal is not to come up with new or best possible algorithms - instead, we want to apply existing algorithms on large sets of images (and possibly video) to find out interesting things about culture (patterns in photos shared online, evolution of artists, etc.)

We are flexible and open - there are lots of cultural image sets waiting to be analyzed. The idea is to take well-performing computational methods and apply to them to image sets where we can get interesting results. We don't have particular narrow "problems" which need to be solved - instead, we want to explore patterns in any interesting cultural image set where computer methods can produce results.



Research outputs:

Our work is presented on the web (see, for example, Phototrais web site), in intenational exhibitions, and in articles and book chapters. Your name will appear on all our outputs which use your work. If you want to publish technical paper(s) about the research done with our lab, you can be the first author on these publications.


Here are examples of media coverage of our most recent project Phototrails:

Wired: Using 2 Million Instagram Pics to Map a City’s Visual Signature.

Fast.Company Co.Create: See Your City's Unique Visual Signature, Created by its Intagram Photos.

Creators Project: What Do Your Instagram Photos Say About Your City?

The Atlantic Cities: The Visual Signature of Your City.

The Guardian: San Francisco viewed through Instagram photos.



Qualifications - Required:

1) PhD in computer vision, image processing, machine learning, or related fields (MA considered).

2) Record of computer science publications in scene classification and/or object recognition in photographs.


Qualifications -Desired:

1) Experience with analyzing art images / aesthetic features of photographs, including implementing high-level "artistic features" (composition, etc.)

2) Experience with analyzing big image sets (millions of images).

3) Experience with automatic video analysis.

4) Experience with image collection visualization.


Salary:

Open - depends on your experience and demonstrated results in relevant areas.


To apply:

Send email with your CV, publications and projects links, salary requirements and availability (starting date, number of hours per week) to: manovich@softwarestudies.com.

The review of applications begins now (July 25, 2013), and the offer will be made as soon as we find the right person.




RESEARCH REFERENCES

[1] Examples of scene classification research:

Automatic Context Analysis for Image Classification and Retrieval.

Photo Classification by Integrating Image Content and Camera Metadata.


[2] Examples of analyzing art images / aesthetic features of photographs:

Affective Image Classification using Features Inspired by Psychology and Art Theory.

Studying Aesthetics in Photographic Images Using a Computational Approach.


[3] State of the art in object classification in photographs:

Visual Object Classes Challenge 2012 (VOC2012).

summary: http://pascallin.ecs.soton.ac.uk/challenges/VOC/voc2012/workshop/history_analysis.pdf

The Programmable City openings: 4 postdocs (5 years) and 4 PhD students (4 years)

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The Programmable City

5 year research project directed by Rob Kitchin


Avaiable positions:

4 postdocs (5 years) and 4 PhD students (4 years)

The project is an empirical extension of the Code/Space book (Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge) published in Software Studies series by The MIT Press (2011). It focuses on the intersection of smart urbanism, ubiquitous computing and big data from a software studies/critical geography perspective, comparing Dublin and Boston and other locales.

The positions are not restricted to any discipline.

Postdoctoral Researchers X 2 Posts (the othee 2 posts will be advertized later this year)
Closing date for applications 22nd March 2013
Further details

Funded PhDs X 4 Posts
Closing date for applications 12th April 2013
Further details



Prof. Rob Kitchin is Director of NIRSA, and Chairperson of the Irish Social Sciences Platform. He has published widely across the social sciences, including 20 books and over 100 articles and book chapters. He is editor of the international journals, Progress in Human Geography (ISI rank 2/61) and Dialogues in Human Geography, and for eleven years was the editor of Social and Cultural Geography. His book 'Code/Space' (with Martin Dodge) won the Association of American Geographers 'Meridian Book Award' for the outstanding book in the discipline in 2011 and a 'CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2011' award from the American Library Association.

250K for two students to do their PhD degrees with Lev Manovich at CUNY

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To be considered, email your 1 page proposal by December 1, 2012.





I am looking for two exceptional individuals who want do their PhDs with me at CUNY Graduate Center beginning in Fall 2013 (or Fall 2014).

To be considered, email your proposal by Dec 1, 2012.
(See "process" section below.)
If I select you, you then need to prepare your formal application to CUNY. Remember that you need to have recent GRE (and TOEFL if you are not a native English speaker).

Funding:
Each student will receive a 25k/year stipend for 5 years (125K in total); tuition fees and medical insurance are also covered. This funding is available for both US and foreign students. The students supported by this package will need to perform some service every year (RA, TA, or teaching one class a semester).

Research areas:
cultural analytics, social computing, digital humanities.

Research goals:
See cultural analytics page at softwarestudies.com

Programs:
One funding package is for a student who will do a PhD in computer science program (my home program at CUNY). The second package is for a student who can enter any other graduate program at CUNY Graduate Center.

CUNY applications information:
Computer science
Other programs

CUNY Deadlines
CUNY application deadlines vary by program. (Computer Science deadline is Jan 15, 2013).

My addmission criteria:
A student who will be admitted to computer science program should have adequate background in this field, and be passionate about using computation to study contemporary cultures and societies using large visual data sets. The possible research areas include computer vision, data mining, and visualization.

A student who will study in a humanities or social science program should have some technical background, and an interest to combine cultural and social theory with computational methods for the analysis of large visual data.

Other requirements: professional publications and/or projects, very good writing skills.

Master degree (in any field) is recommended.

Visual communication skills (including graphic and web design and visualization) are a plus.

Process:
Interested individuals should email me using this address: manovich [dot] lev [at] gmail [dot] com. Please put the phrase "CUNY PhD" in the header. Attach your current CV. The body of the email should containe the following (maximum one page in length):

- Desciption of your interests in cultural analytics / social computing / digital humanities;
- examples of two research projects you want to do with me at CUNY.
- the links to your web site / blog / projects / publications.

The applications that do not follow this format will not be considered.

After I select the semi-finalists, I will contact them to invite them to participate in a small competition (you will have to analyze, visualize, and interpret a sample data set).

The two finalists selected on the basis of this competition and Skype interviews will need to formally apply to the appropriate programs at CUNY Graduate Center. They need to meet the requirements and admission deadlines of these programs.

If I don't find appropriate students for 2013, the support packages will be still available, and the screening process will be repeated for 2014 admission.

Interested students who are already enrolled in PhD programs at CUNY:
you are also welcome to apply.

Alexander Avrorin joins Software Studies Initiative

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We are pleased to welcome the new member of Software Studies Initiative: Alexander Avrorin.

Alexander is a student at Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute (MIFI) - one of three top science universities in Russia. His fields of research is AI. During the summer 2010 he is working with Software Studies Initiative on developing new clustering and visualization techniques for Manga project and other cultural data sets.

Wikipedia article about MIFI








Scatter plot matrix of 4 clusters produced by running fuzzy k-means algorithm over visual features extracted from 13,000 pages of Naruto Manga (1999-2009). The colors show pages cluster membership.

new 2 year post-doc position with Software Studies / University of Bergen

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University of Bergen announced a 2 year Post-doc position in
collaboration with my Software Studies group at UCSD:

The post-doc will divide her/his time between Bergen and San Diego and
will work closely with me and others in my lab on Cultural Analytics
projects.
Cultural Analytics is a new methodology for cultural / media research
which uses information visualization and quantitative data analysis:

lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/09/cultural-analytics.html
www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/

Both technical people who understand cultural issues and cultural
types who can do tech are welcome to apply.



Information and application:

https://secure.jobbnorge.no/Job.aspx?jobid=61657

Note: if you get a page in Norwegian, click on "English" at the bottom
of the page to switch to English version

Tristan Thielmann, Visiting Fellow for Spring 2008

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We here at the Software Studies Initiative are happy to announce our visiting Fellow for Spring 2008: Tristan Thielmann.

Tristan Thielmann is an Assistant Professor in Media Studies at the Research Center "Media Upheavals", University of Siegen, Germany. His cross-disciplinary research and practice explores the aesthetics and history of geomedia with a focus on navigation systems, geobrowsers and geosurveillance technologies. He has recently published a book on digital displays and the spatial turn in cultural & social sciences. For more information on his research, see http://www.spatialturn.de/english.htm. Currently Dr Thielmann is completing three books, one on "locative media", one on "media geography" and another on "actor-media theory". While he is staying as a visiting fellow of Software Studies lab, he is doing oral history interviews with pioneers in mobile cartography and GPS technology.

Welcome Tristan!

EQUIPE | Grupo Software Studies

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	Lev Manovich: Diretor, Software Studies na UCSD; Professor, Visual Arts
	Noah Wardrip-Fruin: Diretor Associado, Software Studies na UCSD; Professor Assistente, Comunicação
	Jeremy Douglass: Pesquisador de Pós-doutorado no Software Studies na UCSD
	Helena Bristow: Administradora do Grupo Software Studies na UCSD; MSO, CRCA

PROFESSORES PARTICIPANTES DA UCSD

• Sheldon Brown: Professor, Visual Arts; Diretor do CRCA; Diretor do Experimental GameLab
• Shlomo Dubnov: Professor Associado, Depto. de Música
• Jim Hollan: Professor, Ciências Cognitivas; Co-Diretor do Distributed Cognition & HCI Laboratory
• Stefan Tanaka: Professor, História
• Geoff Voelker: Professor Associado, Ciência da Computação e Engenharia

AFILIADOS

• Benjamin H. Bratton: Diretor do Advanced Strategies Group, Yahoo! em Santa Monica, CA
• Matthew Fuller: Professor, Convenor of MA Cultural Studies & MA Culture Industry, Goldsmiths College, London University; Editor do livro ‘Software Studies, a lexicon’ MIT Press, 2008
• Scott Lash: Professor de Sociologia; Diretor do Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, London University

Cicero Silva: coordenador do Grupo Software Studies em São Paulo, Brazil @ FILE Labo




PESQUISADOR VISITANTE AFILIADO


SPRING 2008

Tristan Thielmann: Professor Assistente em Media Studies no Research Center "Media Upheavals", University of Siegen, Alemanha

PESQUISADORES


SUMMER 2008

	Jia Gu: pesquisadora de graduação, UCSD -- "new software interfaces for image collections"
Agatha Man: pesquisadora de graduação, UCSD -- "analyses of MMO games" Rachel Cody: Pesquisadora de Pós-graduação,, UCSD -- "analyses of MMO games"

Reunião do Grupo Software Studies no CRCA. Da esquerda para direita: Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Helena Bristow, Jeremy Douglass, Lev Manovich, Tristan Thielmann.

Announcing Jeremy Douglass, Postdoctoral Researcher in Software Studies

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The Software Studies initiative at UCSD is pleased to welcome our new Postdoctoral Researcher, Jeremy Douglass. Jeremy will be researching critical approaches to software and code using the analytic frameworks of the humanities and the social sciences, working on software projects for analyzing (software) culture, and playing a key role in field-building activities for software studies worldwide.

Jeremy is appointed to Software Studies with support from the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA). He will be working with Lev Manovich (Professor, Visual Arts) and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Assistant Professor, Communication) to develop models and tools for the cultural criticism of software, establish the field as a complement to existing research in cyberculture and new media, and investigate how next generation cyberinfrastructure technologies can be used by humanists, social scientists, and cultural practitioners.

Jeremy arrives with a Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara's Department of English. His dissertation, "Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media," explores several critical techniques of interest to the software studies field, including the ongoing influence of code and development tools on software genre formation and the use of close-reading techniques on source code. In addition to a history of publications and presentations on electronic literature and software, he creates visualization artworks and writes for the new media art blog Writer Response Theory.

PEOPLE | Software Studies Initiative

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	Lev Manovich: Director, Software Studies @ UCSD; Professor, Visual Arts
	Noah Wardrip-Fruin: Associate Director, Software Studies @UCSD; Assistant Professor, Computer Science, UCSC
	Jeremy Douglass: Postdoctoral Researcher, Software Studies @ UCSD

ACADEMIC PARTICIPANTS, UCSD

• Sheldon Brown: Professor, Visual Arts; Director, CRCA; Director, Experimental GameLab
• Shlomo Dubnov: Associate Professor, Music
• Amy Alexander: Associate Professor, Visual Arts
• Jim Hollan: Professor, Cognitive Science; Co-Director, Distributed Cognition & HCI Laboratory
• Stefan Tanaka: Professor, History
• Geoff Voelker: Associate Professor, Computer Science & Engineering
• Kelly A. Gates: Assistant Professor, Communication
• Barry Brown: Associate Professor, Communication
• James Fowler Associate Professor, Political Science
• Kyong Park Associate Professor, Visual Arts
• Falko Kuester Associate Professor, Structural Engineering

AFFILIATES

• Benjamin H. Bratton: Director of the Advanced Strategies Group, Yahoo!, Santa Monica, CA
• Matthew Fuller: Reader, Convenor of MA Cultural Studies & MA Culture Industry, Goldsmiths College, London University; Editor, ‘Software Studies, a lexicon’ MIT Press, 2007
• Scott Lash: Professor of Sociology; Director, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, London University

Cicero Silva, Software Studies Initiative @ FILE Labo, Brazil

VISITING FELLOWS
SPRING 2008

Tristan Thielmann: Assistant Professor in Media Studies at the Research Center "Media Upheavals", University of Siegen, Germany

RESEARCHERS
SUMMER 2008

	Hijoo Son: Doctoral candidate in Modern Korean History and Culture, UCLA
	Jia Gu: Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Researcher, UCSD -- "new software interfaces for image collections"
	Agatha Man: Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Researcher, UCSD -- "analyses of MMO games"
	Nichol Bernardo: Undergraduate intern, UCSD -- "Cultural Analytics"
	Bob Li: Undergraduate Graphic Designer
	Rachel Cody: Graduate Researcher, UCSD -- "analyses of MMO games"

Software Studies meeting at CRCA. From left to right: Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Helena Bristow, Jeremy Douglass, Lev Manovich, Tristan Thielmann.