Contents

Acknowledgments

Illustrations

Introduction: How to See One Billion Images

Looking at Culture with Computers

Cultural Analytics: Five Ideas

Cultural Analytics: Twelve Research Challenges

What Cultural Analytics Is Not

Cultural Analytics, Media Theory, and Software Studies

Using This Book in Classes

I Studying Culture at Scale

1 From New Media to More Media

“From New Media to More Media” (2008)

Observing Global Culture in Real Time

Cultural Analytics in Historical Context

2 The Science of Culture?

Analyzing, Visualizing, and Interacting with Cultural Data: Examples

History versus Present, Professionals versus Amateurs

The Regular versus the Particular

The Science of Culture? Deterministic Laws, Statistical Models, Simulation

3 Culture Industry and Media Analytics

A New Stage in Media Technology History

Media Analytics Examples

The Two Parts of Media Analytics

Automation: Media Analysis

Automation: Media Actions

Media Analytics and Cultural Analytics

II Representing Culture as Data

4 Types of Cultural Data

Media: Social Networks and Professional Networks

Behavior: Digital and Physical Traces

Representing Interaction

Events, Places, Organizations

5 Cultural Sampling

The Islands and the Ocean

Museums versus Libraries

Creating Representative Samples

How to See the Invisible

The Limitations of Random Samples

Statistics as Reduction

Why We Need Big Data to Study Cultures

Is Sampling Necessary?

6 Metadata and Features

From a World to a Dataset

Metadata and Features

Data = Objects + Features

Statistics in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: From a Single to Multiple Variables

Interpretation, Explanation, Automation

The Semantic Gap

7 Language, Categories, and Senses

Data Types

Measurement Scales

Language and Senses

Senses and Numbers

Measuring Perceptions

Top-Down and Bottom-Up Analysis

Prescriptive Aesthetics and Modernisms

Analysis Examples: 776 van Gogh Paintings and One Million Manga Pages

More Examples: One Million Artworks and 42,571 Movies

The Society of Categories

III Exploring Cultural Data

8 Information Visualization

What Is Visualization?

Reduction and Space

Visualization without Reduction

Artistic Media Visualization

Cultural Time Series

Beyond Information Visualization

9 Exploratory Media Analysis

Against Search

The Interface

Image Processing and Computer Vision

Using Image Features for Exploratory Media Analysis

Seeing versus Analyzing

10 Methods of Media Visualization

Image Montage

Sampling versus Summarization

Temporal Sampling

Spatial Sampling

Remapping

Conclusion: Can We Think without Categories?

Do We Want to “Explain” Culture?

Is the Goal of Cultural Analytics to Study Patterns? (Yes and No)

How to Think without Categories

Learning to See at a New Scale

Notes

Index