Flickr group to upload visualizations:
www.flickr.com/groups/culture_viz/

Facebook group for discussions, links etc:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=44553052973

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ICAM130/VIS149 | Winter 2008: Contemporary Computer Topics
Visual Arts Department | UCSD

TIme: Wed. 9a-11:50a
Location: MAN 212-Seminar Room

The syllabus for this class is online at www.manovich.net
As the class progresses, the additional materials will be added to the class web site.

instructor: Dr. Lev Manovich
office: Visual Arts Facility (VAF) 553
office hours: by appointment
email: manovich@ucsd.edu

Readings:
All readings for this class will be available online at no charge.


TOPIC:
CULTURAL ANALYTICS


Class background:
White paper and Keynote presentation which describes in detail the ideas leading to this class.
Examples of cultural analytics work done by Software Studies Initiative.

Resources: culturevis.com

Class description:

In 2007 Lev Manovich (Visual Arts, UCSD) and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Communication, UCSD) have set up Software Studies Initiative at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and California Institute for Telecommunications and Information (2007). Together with the researchers and students working in our lab, we have been developing a a new paradigm for the study, teaching and public presentation of cultural artifacts, dynamics, and flows.  We call this paradigm Cultural Analytics.

Today sciences, business, governments and other agencies rely on computer-based analysis and visualization of large data sets and data flows. They employ statistical data analysis, data mining, information visualization, scientific visualization, visual analytics, and simulation. We proposes to begin systematically applying these techniques to contemporary cultural data. The large data sets are already here – the result of the digitization efforts by museums, libraries, and companies over the last ten years (for instance, Google Books, www.artstor.org and archive.org) and the explosive growth of newly available cultural content on the web.  (For instance, as of November 2008, Flickr had 3 billions of images – together with tags created by users and other metadata automatically logged by Flickr servers).

We believe that a systematic use of large-scale analysis and interactive visualization of cultural data will become a major trend in humanities research in the coming decades. The same can be argued for  the analysis and visualization of the social processes that underpin cultural production. What will happen when humanists start using interactive visualizations as a standard tool in their work, the way many scientists do already? If slides made possible art history, and if the movie projector and video recorder enabled film studies, what new cultural disciplines may emerge out of the use of interactive visualization and data analysis?

In April 2008 (exactly one year later we founded Software Studies Initiative),  NEH (National Endowment for Humanities, the main federal agency in the U.S. which provides grants for humanities research) announced a new “Humanities High-Performance Computing” (HHPC) initiative that is based on the similar insight:

“Just as the sciences have, over time, begun to tap the enormous potential of High-Performance Computing, the humanities are beginning to as well. Humanities scholars often deal with large sets of unstructured data. This might take the form of historical newspapers, books, election data, archaeological fragments, audio or video contents, or a host of others. HHPC offers the humanist opportunities to sort through, mine, and better better understand and visualize this data."

In December 2007 NEH awarded us Humanities High Performance Award to use Department of Energy (DOE) Supercomputers to analyze and visualize patterns in large sets of visual media.


Based on the already completed case studies done in our lab, in this class we will together develop analytical and visualization techniques appropriate for working with time-based visual media such as feature films, animation, motion graphics, use-generated video, and videos of gameplay. The work in this class will allow us to process massive amounts of such material on DOE supercomputers - something which was never done before. We will also have access to state of the art supervisualization system at Calit2 (HIPerSpace) to display class projects.

The tools used in the class include ImageJ open-source image processing software, Google Docs, Excel, and other applications.

Class structure includes a few different formats: individual assignments, working in groups, and work with all other students in class in a coordinated fashion. Students will be evaluated both on their individual work and on their contribution to group projects.

One of the goals of this class is to explore how the community-assigned semantic descriptions of media artifacts can be combined with automatic computer analysis of their visual structure.
Therefore, some of our practical work will involve discussing the ways of assigning these descriptions and then working collaboratively to describe sets of cultural artifacts.

This class is a research seminar where the students will be involved in the original research program which was never undertaken before. Therefore, I am not providing a detailed week-by-week schedule of the class: what we will do next will be determined by our progress up to that point.

Class timeline:

In the first part of the course we will be all working together on the same cultural material. Our goals are 1) to get comfortable with the tools and methods for quantitative analysis and visualization; 2) to push Cultural Analytics further by combining our collective insights and expertise.

In the second part of the class the students will have a choice: they can continue working on the same cultural material to go furher, or they can form groups which will use the tools and methods the students learned so far to analyze different types of cultural artifacts.

Requirements:

1.Consistent class attendance. Class attendance will be taken every class - at different times. You are allowed to miss one class meeting without an excuse. Missing any additional classes without proper excuse (doctor's notice) will lower your final grade half a letter grade for each class missed. Chronic lateness counts as absence. Forgetting to sign the attendance sheet or leaving early counts as absence.

2. Reading the assigned materials before each class meeting. If any additional online resources are assigned, you should go through them them before the class as well.
Students should be prepared to answer questions about the readings in class verbally and in writing.

3. Timely completion of the individual assignments.
No late assignments will be accepted.

4. Timely completion of the group assignments.
No late assignments will be accepted.
If the group does not complete its assigned work on time, all group participants will be penalized equally.

5. Participation in a group project. The project will be judged using the following criteria:
(1) is it visually compelling?
(2) is it meaningful and original, i.e. does it reveal new cultural patterns which are not not already obvious or known?
(3) is is technically competent?
More detailed information and requirements for the group projects will be provided later in the quarter.

Grading:
Each component of the class (1-5) is equally important and will be counted equally in determining the final grade.