Analyzing Cultural Patterns

http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/09/cultural-analytics.html



At the above website I came across an interesting article titled "Cultural-Analytics: Visualizing Cultural Patterns in the Era of "More Media." by Lev Manovich, a visual arts professor at the University of California. Manovich and his team developed the Software Studies Initiative to better analyze digital cultural patterns. In 2008, Manovich received a grant from the US National Endowment for the Humanities/Digital Humanities office, which helped get 300,000 hours of computing time on the Department of Energy supercomputers. Manovich and his team are working towards developing visual systems that can follow real-time cultural flow, and can constantly update data from the web in real-time. The need for this software is due to the effects of cultural and digital globalization. Its become impossible to keep track of "global digital cultures" when there are millions of contributors, and billions of cultural objects.

Millions of people are able to create new media everyday due to sites like Youtube.com and Flickr. People are creating and sharing cultural content, such as, comments, photos, blogs, videos, etc. I think its brilliant that Manovich wants to development software that can use the mass amounts of "born-digital" cultural content to gather information and track global cultures, as the previous tools for collecting cultural data do not apply to the "digital world".