Visualizing Innovation and Cultural Data Flows

Lev Manivich is an author and Professor of Visual Arts at UCSD who’s looking for new ways to create quantitative measures of cultural innovation and visualize cultural flows and how trends change over time.

Using powerful computers and huge data sets culled from sources such as digital media collections, social network traffic, meta data and conversations on the web, Manivich hopes to visualize all this information into a comprehensive map that can be studied and explored for real time cultural analysis.

Manivich explains:

Imagine a real-time traffic display (like in car navigation systems), except that the display is wall-size, the resolution is thousands of times greater, and the traffic shown is not cars on highways but real-time cultural flows around the world. Imagine the same wall-sized display divided into multiple frames, each showing different data about cultural, social, and economic news and trends — thus providing a situational awareness for cultural analysts. Imagine a wall-sized computer graphic showing the long tail of cultural production that allows you to zoom to see each individual product together with rich data about it (à la real estate maps on Zillow) while the graph is constantly updated in real-time by pulling data from the Web. These are the kinds of projects I want to create.

HPC Wire: “The Next Big Thing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science Computing: Cultural Analytics “