Images

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Exemplary images from recent and ongoing projects.

Cultural Analytics research environment: relationships map	Cultural Analytics research environment: long tail view	Cultural Analytics research environment: geo view	Cultural Analytics research environment on the Calit2 HiPerSpace
2000 art images on the HiPerSpace	UCSD undergraduates exploring data on the HiPerSpace	Interactive analysis of Mark Rothko's paintings on the HiPerSpace	Interactive analysis of Mark Rothko's paintings on the HiPerSpace
Visualization of the complete text of "Anna Karenina"	SIGGRAPH poster - visualization of patterns in films, motion graphics, cartoons and political TV ads	SIGGRAPH poster comparing 20 video games from 1988-2009	Image analysis of 19th and 20th century European painters
Mark Rothko's career - 160 paintings organized by saturation and dominant colors	Visualization of Mark Rothko's career: changes in paintings' saturation over time (1934-1970)	Evolution of modern art (1840-1920)	The continuity of realism and modernism in painting (circa 1930).
Automated analysis of screen regions for segmenting gameplay modes in "Fatal Frame 2"	Exploration of world-map in "Legend of Zelda" on the HIPerWall	Montage of sampled frames from speed-run of "Fatal Frame 2" (white frames corresponds to combat sequences)	Timeline showing the rhythm of gameplay in "Knights of the Old Republic"
Use of medical imaging techniques for cultural analysis: a slice through an art video (each pixel row corresponds to one frame)	Comparing editing patterns in Russian, French and American films, 1900-2008	Keyframes from a music video clustered by brightness and number of shapes in an image	visual signatures: Betty Boop cartoons (1930s) vs. Bjork's music video
All Google logos (1998-2009): analysis of variability over time	Branching structure of an interactive novel	Variations from the standard template in all of Google logos (1998-2009)	"FreakAngels" web comic panels clustered by brightness and hue

EVENTS

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Cultural Analytics workshop @ FILE 2009

DAC 2009: chamada para área de Estudos do Software e Plataformas

National University of Singapore awards a grant for Cultural Analytics research

Software Studies Brazil at PARALELO: Technology & Environment

Software Art at CFAV, Recife (Brazil)

software studies course @Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico)

Eventos do Grupo de Software Studies em São Paulo

"Deep Search" Symposium

Cultural Analytics @ ISEA 2008

SoftWhere 2008 | international workshop in Software Studies at UCSD, May 21-22, 2008

Publications in Software Studies:: Second Person - Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media

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Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media
Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Editors
The MIT Press
February 2007

Games and other playable forms, from interactive fictions to improvisational theater, involve role playing and story--something played and something told. In Second Person, game designers, authors, artists, and scholars examine the different ways in which these two elements work together in tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), computer games, board games, card games, electronic literature, political simulations, locative media, massively multiplayer games, and other forms that invite and structure play.

Second Person--so called because in these games and playable media it is "you" who plays the roles, "you" for whom the story is being told--first considers tabletop games ranging from Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs with an explicit social component to Kim Newman's Choose Your Own Adventure-style novel Life's Lottery and its more traditional author-reader interaction. Contributors then examine computer-based playable structures that are designed for solo interaction--for the singular "you"--including the mainstream hit Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and the genre-defining independent production Façade. Finally, contributors look at the intersection of the social spaces of play and the real world, considering, among other topics, the virtual communities of such Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) as World of Warcraft and the political uses of digital gaming and role-playing techniques (as in The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, the first U.S. presidential campaign game).

In engaging essays that range in tone from the informal to the technical, these writers offer a variety of approaches for the examination of an emerging field that includes works as diverse as George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards series and the classic Infocom game Planetfall.

Second Person features three complete tabletop role-playing games that demonstrate some of the variations possible in the form: in John Tynes's Puppetland, players take on the roles of puppets in a land ruled by the villainous Punch; Greg Costikyan's Bestial Acts imports the techniques of Bertolt Brecht's theater of alienation into a dark role-playing structure; and in James Wallis's The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the gameplay revolves around spinning elaborate tales in the style of the famous raconteur.

SOFTWARE STUDIES

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ABOUT | SPONSORS | PEOPLE | PRESS

Software Studies Initiative has two labs in New York and San Diego:


Software Studies NYC location: The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Ave, New York. Built in 1906.


Software Studies NYC California location: Calit2, La Jolla, CA. Built in 2005.

About Software Studies Initiative

Español | Português


Google searches and Amazon recommendations, airline flight paths and traffic lights, email and your phone: our culture runs on software. How does software shape the world?

Software Studies is a new research paradigm in the humanities and media studies that emerged in the second part of 2000s. The very first book that has this term in its title was published by The MIT Press in June 2008 (Matthew Fuller, ed., Software Studies: A Lexicon). In August 2008 The MIT Press started Software Studies book series, with Matthew Fuller, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Lev Manovich as editors:

"Software Studies" book series | MIT Press book series

Lev Manovich: Software Takes Command | Forhcoming from Bloomsbury Academic, 2013

SoftWhere 2008 | International workshop in Software Studies, UCSD, May 21-22, 5/2008



Software Studies at Calit2

The Software Studies Initiative was founded in 2007 to help the development of this field. We work to disseminate the broad vision of software studies. That is, we think of software as a layer that permeates all areas of contemporary societies. Therefore, if we want to understand contemporary techniques of control, communication, representation, simulation, analysis, decision-making, memory, vision, writing, and interaction, our analysis can't be complete until we consider this software layer. This is why we are convinced that “software studies” is necessary and we welcome you to join us in our projects and activities.

Software Studies Initiative UC San Diego is housed within the UCSD Division of the California Institute for Telecommunication and Information Technology (Calit2. The technical facilities, research labs and staff support for the research in digital media at Calit2 unmatched anywhere on the West Coast:




The projects and activities of the Software Studies Initiative are taking full advantage of our unique affiliation with Calit2. Calit2 is developing innovative cyberinfrastructure for the next paradigm of scientific research based on remote collaboration between teams of scientists, working with very large data sets, and access to state-of-the-art computing, storage, networking and display technologies. In our project we are exploring how these cyberinfrastructure tools can be used in humanities and social science research.


Software Studies and Cultural Analytics

How can the latest tools in data analysis and visualization be used in relation to cultural data? How can we take advantage of unprecedented amounts of cultural data available on the web to begin analyzing culture in new ways? How does computational analysis of these massive datasets can help us to develop new cultural theory for the 21st century global networked digital culture ?

Cultural Analytics is a new field (2007) provoked by these questions. We define cultural analytics as the use of computational methods for the analysis of massive cultural data sets and flows. But rather than simply borrowing existing techniques and software from the sciences and the industry, we also examining their underlying assumptions and conceptual foundations.

Understood in view of these questions, our research at Software Studies Initiative covers two complementary directions:

1) Study of software and cyberinfrastructure and their deployment in modern societies using approaches from humanities, cultural criticism, and social sciences.

2) Use software-based research methods and next generation cyberinfrastructrure tools and resources for the study of massive sets of visual cultural data, asking theoretical questions which are important for humanities.


Working with a visualization of one million images on 287 HIPerSpace display at Calit2.


SPONSORS

The Andrew Mellon Foundation
National Science Foundation (NSF)
NEH Office of Digital Humanities
Calit2 UCSD Division
CRCA
UCDARnet
UCHRI
National University of Singapore

If you are interested in engaging in internships, collaborative research with our group or sponsoring innovative research projects, please contact Dr. Lev Manovich, Director of Software Studies Initiative at manovich.lev@gmail.com.


PEOPLE

Faculty researchers

	Lev Manovich: Director, Software Studies @ CALIT2; Professor, CUNY
	Jeremy Douglass: Assistant Professor, English, UCSB
	Cicero Inacio da Silva: Professor, Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), Brazil

Visiting fellows

	Winter and Spring 2011: Jean-Francois Lucas: PhD candidate in Sociology, European University of Brittany, Rennes
	Spring 2009: Tristan Thielmann: Assistant Professor in Media Studies at the Research Center "Media Upheavals", University of Siegen, Germany

Post-doc researchers

	Eduardo Navas: Postdoctoral Scholar, Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, 2010-2012.
	Jeremy Douglass: Postdoctoral Researcher, Software Studies, Calit2, 2007-2012.

Graduate researchers, UCSD, 2007-2012

	William Huber (Visual Arts)
	Tara Zepel (Visual Arts)
	So Yamaoka (Computer Science and Engineering)
	Sunsern Cheamanunku (Computer Science and Engineering)
	Chanda L. Carey (Visual Arts)
	Daniel Rehn (Visual Arts)
	Laura Hoeger (Visual Arts)
	Stephen Mandiberg (Communication)
	Rachel Cody (Sociology)
	Hijoo Son (History, UCLA)

Undergraduate researchers, UCSD, 2007-2012

	Devon Merill (Independent Summer Internship -- "Exploring comics and manga through scripted image processing workflows." Summer 2009.)
	Jia Gu (Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Researcher, UCSD -- "new software interfaces for image collections". Summer 2008.)
	Agatha Man (Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Researcher, UCSD -- "analyses of MMO games". Summer 2008.)
	Nichol Bernardo (Undergraduate intern, UCSD -- "Cultural Analytics". Summer 2008.
	Bob Li (Undergraduate Graphic Designer. Summer 2008.)
	Kedar Reddy (Calit2 summer 2009 undergraduate fellow)
	Christa Lee (Fall 2008 independent study - arthistory.viz)
	Victoria Azurin (Undergraduate intern, UCSD -- "Cultural Analytics - visual culture applications". Summer 2009; Manga project - summer 2010)
	Xiaoda Wang (Undergraduate intern, UCSD -- "Cultural Analytics - art history applications". Summer 2009.)
	Nadia Xiangfei Zeng (Undergraduate researcher, UCSD -- Manga project; gallery@calit2 Software Studies exhibition; visualization software. Summer 2010.)

Faculty Collaborators, UCSD, 2007-2012

• Noah Wardrip-Fruin:Associte Professor, Computer Science, UCSC (co-founder of Software Studies Initiative)
• Kay O'Halloran, Multimondal Analysis Lab, NUS (cultural analytics)
• Cinemetrics: a research group comprising leading film scholars (film analysis)
• David Kirsh, Cognitive Science, UCSD (dance video analysis)
• Digital Formalism project: Department for Theatre, Film and Media Studies (TFM), Vienna University; the Austrian Film Museum; Interactive Media Systems Group, Vienna University of Technology (film analysis)
• Isabel Galhano Rodrigues, University of Porto, Portugald (gesture analysis)
• Jim Hollan, Cognitive Science, UCSD (UCSD Collaboratory Grant - development of Cultural Analytics software)
• Falko Kuester, Structural Engineering (UCSD Collaboratory Grant - development of Cultural Analytics software)
• National University of Singapore (4 faculty from different departments - application of Cultural Analytics methods and techniques to the analysis of Asian cultures)
• Matthew Fuller, Goldsmiths College, University of London (Software Studies)

Members of Software Studies Initiative working with a visualization showing 128 short videos.

PRESS

Manovich and Cultural analytics research in The Chronicle for Higher Education

Cultural analytics research in NEH Humanities magazine

About our exhibition SHAPING TIME at Graphic Design Museum (Breda, ND)

Software Studies work with National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center

Expressive Processing by Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Lev Manovich 's workshop @ FILE Labo 2009

Cultural analytics coverage in Singapore and UAE

A Computing Science Approach For Analyzing Culture (www.supercomputingonline.com)

Software Studies in Chronicle of Higher Education

Calit2 article about our Humanities High-Performance Computing grant

Lev Manovich is interviewed about Cultural Analytics for BBC World Service "Digital Planet" show

Visualizing Cultural Patterns in N Art Magazine

Cultural Analytics in voiceofsandiego.org article

Cultural Analytics @ ISEA 2008

HPCwire article about Cultural Analytics

Game Libratory featured on NotCot

"Visualizing Cultural Patterns" featured in UCSD/Calit2 article

SoftWhere '08 press release and article in San Diego Business Journal

UC San Diego New-Media Expert Pushes Peer Review into the 21st Century

A era da infoestética