Renowned Digital Humanities Expert Lev Manovich to Speak at Bard College on Thursday, September 26

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—On Thursday, September 26, renowned digital humanities expert Lev Manovich, a professor at CUNY Graduate Center and founder and director of the Software Studies Initiative, will speak at Bard College. Manovich’s talk, “How to Compare One Million Images? Visualizing Patterns in User-Generated Content, Art, Games, Comics, Cinema, Web, and Print,” is being presented by Bard’s Experimental Humanities, Film and Electronic Arts, and Computer Science Programs. The talk takes place at 5 p.m. in the Jim Ottaway Jr. Film Center theater and is free and open to the public.

Manovich’s presentation will be illustrated with examples of Software Studies Initiative research, including analysis of 2.3 million Instagram photos, 1 million pages from manga books, and 1 million user-created artworks (from http://www.deviantart.com/ ). Manovich will also discuss how computational analysis and visualization of big cultural data sets leads us to question traditional discrete categories used for cultural categorization such as “style” and “period.” How do we navigate massive visual collections of user-generated content consisting of billions of images? What new theoretical concepts do we need to deal with the scale of born-digital culture? How do we use data mining of massive cultural data sets to question our cultural assumptions and biases? These are among the questions Manovich will explore in his talk.

Lev Manovich is a professor at CUNY Graduate Center and founder and director of Software Studies Initiative. He is the is the author of Software Takes Command (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), Black Box – White Cube (Merve Verlag Berlin, 2005), Soft Cinema DVD (The MIT Press, 2005), The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001), Metamediji (Belgrade, 2001), and Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture (Chicago University Press, 1993), as well as 110 articles that have been published in 30 countries and reprinted more than 500 times. In 2007 Manovich founded Software Studies Initiative. The lab is developing Cultural Analytics: computational analysis and visualization of massive cultural visual datasets in the humanities. The lab's past and present collaborators include MoMA, Library of Congress, Getty Research Institute, Austrian Film Museum, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Image, and other institutions that are interested in using its methods and software with their media collections.

Manovich was born in Moscow, where he studied fine arts, architecture and computer programming. He moved to New York in 1981, receiving an M.A. in experimental psychology (NYU, 1988) and a Ph.D. in visual and cultural studies from University of Rochester (1993). 

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(9.19.13)

This event was last updated on 09-20-2013

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