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Thursday, November 11, 2010

"Mapping Time" exhibition opens at gallery@calit2

MAPPING TIME
Visualizations of temporal patterns in media and art

mappingtime

Exhibition by Lev Manovich, Jeremy Douglass, William Huber

With: Adelheid Heftberger, Agatha Man, Alex Avrorin, Bertrand Grandgeorge, Bob Li, Chanda L. Carey, Christa Lee, Christine Pham, Colin Wheelock, Daniel Rehn, Devon Merill, Jia Gu, Kedar Reddy, Laura Hoeger, Michael Briganti, Nichol Bernardo, Ong Kian Peng (aka Bin), Rachel Cody, Sergie Magdalin, So Yamaoka, Steven Mandiberg, Sunsern Cheamanunku, Tara Zepel, Victoria Azurin, Xiangfei Zeng, Xiaoda Wang.

October 4 - December 10, 2010
gallery@Calit2
University of California, San Diego

Panel discussion and opening reception was held on October 22, 2010. (Photos on Flickr.)
Film screening and closing reception: December 3, 2010.


This fall, the gallery@calit2 presents "Mapping Time," an exhibition by the Software Studies Initiative. Since 2008, the Software Studies Initiative has focused on the development of new methods and techniques for the analysis and visualization of visual and interactive media. The exhibition coincides with the lab releasing a number of open-source tools which were used to create all works in the exhibition.

The lab is directed by Lev Manovich, UCSD Professor of Visual Arts and Calit2 researcher; its core participants are Jeremy Douglass (Calit2 post-doctoral researcher) and William Huber (PhD candidate in visual arts). In addition, undergraduate and graduate students and faculty from the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Communication, Visual Arts, the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, and Calit2 participate in the lab's work.

The lab uses the term Cultural Analytics to refer to its techniques for the analysis and visualization of large cultural data sets. For the "Mapping Time" exhibition, the concept is to render the "shapes" of cultural time. According to Manovich, "our goal is to demonstrate how we can visualize gradual changes over time at a number of scales - from a single minute of a video game play, to 11 years of the popular manga title Naruto, to 130 years of the journal Science (1880-2010).” The exhibition includes visualizations of novels, video game play, web comics, manga, motion graphics, feature films, and mass media publications such as Time magazine presented via large-scale prints, animations and real-time generative projections.

Software Studies Initiative research is supported by Calit2, CRCA, UCSD, the NEH Office of Digital Humanities and NSF.

Software Studies Initiative contact: William Huber <whuber@ucsd.edu>.
Calit2 media contact: Doug Ramsey <dramsey@ucsd.edu>.

http://www.softwarestudies.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis
http://gallery.calit2.net

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

steps towards real-time global cultural analytics

When we started Software Studies Initiative in 2007, one of our first steps was to imagine an interface for exploring real-time cultural trends on a a giant 287 megapixel HIPerSpace display constructed at UCSD.

Cultural Analytics research environment: geo view

Our interface remained only a design until now - however, now we are seeing a growing number of visualizations which measure some social media activity and create rudimentary maps, or simply list trending keywords (for instance, twitter web site itself) - little steps towards a future much richer map which can be actually useful.

A WORLD OF TWEETS project by frogdesign stands out from the rest - the dashboard around visualization offers useful information and you can actually start seeing interesting trends. (It also shows that now that everybody has access to the APIs and data they provide, its good designers who will make better visualizations):

aworldoftweets.png

-------------------------------
Countries with the most tweets (Since 1st Nov 2010):

UNITED STATES 38%
INDONESIA 15%
UNITED KINGDOM 10%
BRAZIL 7%

-------------------------------
Patterns observed:

- parts of the US are completely silent
- Europe is fully on (good job!)
- all other clusters of tweet activity are on or relatively close to the ocean coasts
- compare this map to another wold map made from geolocations of 35 million Flickr photos - which all cluster in coastal areas :



(David Crandall, Lars Backstrom, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg. Mapping the World's Photos. WWW 2009):

-------------------------------
More data from A WORLD OF TWEETS:

Top 4 Asian countries are:

INDONESIA 65.26%
JAPAN 10.76%
SOUTH KOREA 6.17%
MALAYSIA 4.96%

-------------------------------
Patterns observed:

While doing research on the global Manga interest using Google Insight (which analyzes the amount of Google searchers for particular keywords), I also noticed that Indonesia and Malaysia were the top countries in the world in terms of number of searches for manga.

The following are the screen grabs from Google Insight:

google_insight_manga_2.png

google_insight_manga_1.png

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

PSP on Sourcemap

PSP on Sourcemap

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Art Objects as Data Points | 200,000 images in UCSD art library



Gu, Jia. Art Objects as Data Points.
Presentation at Calit2 Summer Researchers Poster Session. 2008 (pdf)

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Mapping Time exhibition opening photos

Mapping Time exhibition by Software Studies Initiative at gallery@calit2
gallery opening 1st photo set on Flickr
gallery opening 2nd photo set on Flickr

Exhibition description


Gallery 5

Monday, October 11, 2010

new article "What is Visualization?"

A new 8,000 word article "What is Visualization?"

- an analysis of the key principles behind visualization practice during its first 300 years, and the new 21st century developments in  "media visualization"




manovich_visualization_2010.doc

Saturday, August 28, 2010

NSF awards $300,000 grant to Experimental Game Lab and Software Studies Initiative

A project proposal submitted by Sheldon Brown (Director, Experimental Game Lab, UCSD) and Lev Manovich (Director, Software Studies Initiative, UCSD) was awarded $300,000 two year EAGER grant by National Science Foundation (NSF).

The title of the proposal: A Cultural Analytics Framework for Identifying and Integrating Creative Patterns of User Behavior and Experience in the Scalable City Multi-User Virtual World.

EAGER grants aim to support "high-risk, exploratory, and potentially transformative research."


Scalable City
Scalable City rendered in real time by world engine developed at Experimental Game Lab