ABSTRACT
Digital research is taking the humanities by storm. This can be read not only from the many digital humanities programs in education and research in universities around the world but also from the attention for new media practices in humanities and art departments. Famously, and thought-provokingly, media theorist Lev Manovich—strongly rooted in film and media studies—set out to develop a means by which the visual analysis of big data sets of digitized cultural materials could help the study of art and culture transition into the era of big data or, as he calls it, 90the era of “more media” (Manovich, 2009). Often met with scrutiny by art historians, not in favor of a quantitative approach to the arts, Manovich insisted with this “cultural analytics” program on expanding the study of culture by including the vast amounts of user-generated content. As he wrote as early as 2009: “Think about this: the number of images uploaded to Flickr every week is probably larger than all objects contained in all art museums in the world.” Manovich developed the Software Studies Initiative, where he and his team developed software such as Image Plot, for the analysis of large visual data sets. Manovich applies his methods both to digitized materials (such as Time magazine covers) as well as—more recently—to born-digital content (such as selfies on Instagram). 1
