Metabolic Studio Public Salon:Lev ManovichFriday, May 14, 2010 @ NoonFree Admission

How to read 1000000 Manga pages?

Visualizing patterns in art, cinema, TV, animation, games, comics, user-generated content and mass media

Over the last 20 years, information visualization has become a common tool in science and also a growing presence in the arts and culture at large. However, the use of visualization in humanities is still in its infancy. In 2007 we established a new lab (softwarestudies.com) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and California Institute for Telecommunication and Information (Calit2) to focus on the analysis and visualization of patterns in large sets of visual data - art, photography, film, animation, motion graphics, video games, magazines, web sites, and other visual media.

I will show how use of visualization allows us to ask new kinds of questions about cultural evolution and history and will show a number of current research projects - including the analysis and visualization of patterns across 1,074,790 Manga pages (912 titles).

Cultural Analytics: http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/09/cultural-analytics.html
Software studies initiative: softwarestudies.com
Visualizations: flickr.com/photos/culturevis/

Lev Manovich's books include Software Takes Command (released under CC license, 2008), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (The MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001) which is hailed as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." He has written 100 articles which have been reprinted over 400 times in many languages. Manovich is a Professor in Visual Arts Department, University of California - San Diego, a Director of the Software Studies Initiative at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a Professor at European Graduate School, and a Visiting Research Professor at De Montfort University (UK).