Cultural Analytics in voiceofsandiego.org article

• 
• Tweet

voiceofsandiego.org (San Diego's nonprofit source of daily news) published an article about analytics industry in San Diego which also talks about our Cultural Analytics work. The article opens with the photo of Lev Manovich behind Cultural Analytics Research Environment interface design.

Lea Yu, "Analyze This," voiceofsandiego.org, September 2, 2008

Eventos do Grupo de Software Studies em São Paulo

• 
• Tweet

Os eventos do Grupo Software Studies são encontros mensais com teleconferências, seminários e palestras com pesquisadores da área. Veja abaixo a programação mês a mês:


17 de setembro de 2008 às 17h15: Seminário via teleconferência sobre as pesquisas no campo dos Software Studies com Jeremy Douglass e Cicero Silva.

Jeremy Douglass é pós-doutorando no Grupo de Software Studies na University of California, San Diego (UCSD), afiliado ao Calit2 e ao Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) e ao departamento de Artes Visuais.
Jeremy pesquisa as aproximações entre código e software para uma possível crítica desses meios, utilizando o instrumental analítico das humanidades e das ciências sociais. O trabalho de Jeremy está presente nos livros Second Person (MIT Press, 2007), no Iowa Review Web (2006) e em conferências como a DAC (2005). Sua tese de doutorado "Linhas de comando: técnica e estética na ficção interativa e nas novas mídias" (UCSB, 2007) está disponível on-line. Jeremy escreve para o blog de novas mídias e arte Writer Response Theory.

Cicero Silva é coordenador do grupo de Software Studies no Brasil.

Onde: CIANTEC (Congresso Internacional de Arte, Novas Tecnologias e Comunicação)

Centro Histórico da Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie.

Rua Itambé, 45 - Higienópolis, São Paulo - SP

assista ao vídeo da webconferência com Jeremy Douglass

18 de setembro de 2008 às 17h15

Seminário sobre Analítica Cultural (Cultural Analytics) com Lev Manovich.

A webconferência de Manovich será sobre o projeto Analítica Cultural, desenvolvido no grupo de Software Studies, com ênfase no projeto Culturevis, que é uma sistematização dos sistemas culturais em formas visuais computacionais operada por supercomputadores.  

Onde: CIANTEC (Congresso Internacional de Arte, Novas Tecnologias e Comunicação)

Centro Histórico da Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie.

Rua Itambé, 45 - Higienópolis, São Paulo - SP

assista ao vídeo da webconferência de Lev Manovich

20 de outubro de 2008 às 19h30: Teleconferência com William Huber, pesquisador do Center for Research in Computing and the Arts na UCSD, sobre jogos eletrônicos no grupo de Software Studies no FILE Labo.

Onde: FILE Labo - Rua Carlos Weber, 835, São Paulo, SP, CEP 05303-902, Brasil
Coordenação: Cicero Silva

Saiba mais acessando nosso calendário:

FilmHistory.viz | Patterns across 1100 Feature Films, 1900-2008

• 
• Tweet

FilmHistory.viz is an exploration of patterns in the history of cinema using data on 1100+ feature films.

The data was collected by film scholars from around the world and is available at Cinemetrics.lv. For each film Cinemetrics databse provides statistics such as average shot length, number of shots, etc.

Our initial work looks at the patterns in shot lengths across different periods in the 20th century and diffirent countries.

Special thanks to Yuri Tsivian for generously providing access to the Cinemetrics database.

Average shot length, feature films 1902-2008

Career statistics: Godard

Career statistics: Tarkovsky




Data used to generate this chart: [PDF] [TEXT]

"Deep Search" Symposium

• 
• Tweet

"DEEP SEARCH"
The digital future of finding out
World-Information Institute Symposium
Sat. 08.11.2008          
11:00 - 20:00
Austria Trend Hotel Savoyen Vienna
In cooperation with IRFS
Organized by Felix Stalder and Konrad Becker

With the explosion of information in all shades and languages, issues of
orientation and navigation in the oceans of knowledge pose themselves with
renewed urgency. Information is useless if it cannot be found and it is not
a co-incidence that a search engine like Google, turned into one of the
most significant companies of the new century. There is an intense debate
in science and industry on the implications of these global trends, but
there is also a growing awareness as to the socio-cultural implications of
"search" and the information retrieval of the future.

"Deep Search" wants to look at the social and political dimensions of how
we navigate the deep seas of knowledge. We want to examine the pursuit of
categorizing that data and what it means to relate to the world through
digital search technologies. Futuristic applications and computational
complexity aside, cognitive technologies deliberately designed to yield
results in a limited frame of reference, imbed political philosophy in
seemingly neutral code. In the daily reality of information overflow it is
crucial to acknowledge both the arbitrariness and willful designation, and
that hierarchies are not miraculously produced by nature itself. Innocent
utilities that blend into the routine of everyday work and leisure subtly
bend our perception, and weave threads into the fabric of cognitive
reality.

How is computer readable significance produced, how is meaning involved in
machine communication? Where is the emancipatory potential of these having
access to such vast amounts of information? And where lie the dangers of
having to rely on search engines to make use if that information? These
questions of culture, context und classification in information systems
should not be ignored since what is at stake is nothing less than how we,
as individuals and institutions, come to find out about the world. "Deep
Search" addresses the social and cultural dimension as well as the
information politics and societal implications of search.

http://www.t0.or.at/
http://world-information.org/

Cultural Analytics @ ISEA 2008

• 
• Tweet

In his review of ISEA2008, Making Sense of ISEA2008 (Without Any Decent Statistics), Brogan Brunt discusses Lev Manovich's lecture on cultural analytics. Brunt notes that the problem of overload was very much a part of the conference itself:

Lev Manovich argued that we have shifted from a state of new media to one of 'more' media. There is simply so much media these days (the product of new technologies and social interactive forms) that it is humanly impossible to gain an overall perspective. Our only viable option is to draw upon the quantitative methods that have driven contemporary science and business ... Manovich's lecture, delivered to a packed audience, resonated very much with my experience of ISEA2008. With its 800 delegates, five concurrent streams, juried exhibition and huge range of associated panels, seminars, workshops and exhibitions, ISEA2008 was anything but digestible.

MySpace.viz | Tracking visual conversations in social networks

• 
• Tweet

MySpace.viz begun as a collaborative project CommenTree between four undergraduate Visual Arts UCSD students in a Spring 2008 class taught by Lev Manovich. The project uses the data from MySpace collected by UCSD graduate student Derek Lomas and other researchers at UCSD in July 2006. The data collectedconsists from 1,094,000 users comments collected from 32,000 separate MySpace pages. CommenTree visualizes the dynamics of user interactions using a subset of this data.

Kyle Gowen (one of the original developers of CommenTree) is currently taking the project further in collaboration with Software Studies.

CommenTree web site

CommenTree is included in visualcomplexity.com collection.

A snapshot from CommenTree dynamic visualization

culturevis.com

• 
• Tweet

A growing number of projects use information visualization to graph cultural patterns, relationships, and dynamics. The people who are doing this exiting work come from a variety of areas: digital art, media design, architecture, computer science, computer graphics, and others. The breadth of this new area of culture is inspiring - and it also makes it hard to follow its growth. This is why we created Culturevis.

Culturevis brings you our selection of best projects accompanied by (highly opinionated!) critical annotations. You will also find a list of resources for doing and thinking about culture visualizations: software tools, sources of data, critical texts. We also suggest a number of preliminary genres in order to help map this new field.

The projects featured at Culturevis will be accompanied by critical commentaries written by members of Software Studies Initiative.