Index

Acknowledgments ix
Illustrations xi

Introduction: How to See One Billion Images 1

Looking at Culture with Computers 2
Cultural Analytics: Five Ideas 7
Cultural Analytics: Twelve Research Challenges 13
What Cultural Analytics Is Not 16
Cultural Analytics, Media Theory, and Software Studies 17
Using This Book in Classes 19

I Studying Culture at Scale 23

1 From New Media to More Media 25
"From New Media to More Media" (2008) 28
Observing Global Culture in Real Time 31
Cultural Analytics in Historical Context 35

2 The Science of Culture? 39

Analyzing, Visualizing, and Interacting with Cultural Data: Examples 39
History versus Present, Professionals versus Amateurs 44
The Regular versus the Particular 47
The Science of Culture? Deterministic Laws, Statistical Models, Simulation 49

3 Culture Industry and Media Analytics 53

A New Stage in Media Technology History 56
Media Analytics Examples 56
The Two Parts of Media Analytics 59
Automation: Media Analysis 61
Automation: Media Actions 64
Media Analytics and Cultural Analytics 67

II Representing Culture as Data 73

4 Types of Cultural Data 75
Media: Social Networks and Professional Networks 77
Behavior: Digital and Physical Traces 82
Representing Interaction 87
Events, Places, Organizations 89

5 Cultural Sampling 93

The Islands and the Ocean 94
Museums versus Libraries 98
Creating Representative Samples 100
How to See the Invisible 102
The Limitations of Random Samples 108
Statistics as Reduction 111
Why We Need Big Data to Study Cultures 114
Is Sampling Necessary? 116

6 Metadata and Features 121

From a World to a Dataset 122
Metadata and Features 125
Data - Objects + Features 128
Statistics in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: From a Single to Multiple Variables 133
Interpretation, Explanation, Automation 136
The Semantic Gap 139

7 Language, Categories, and Senses 145

Data Types 145
Measurement Scales 148
Language and Senses 152
Senses and Numbers 157
Measuring Perceptions 160
Top-Down and Bottom-Up Analysis 163
Prescriptive Aesthetics and Modernisms 165
Analysis Examples: 776 van Gogh Paintings and One Million Manga Pages 169
More Examples: One Million Artworks and 42,571 Movies 176
The Society of Categories 180

III Exploring Cultural Data 185

8 Information Visualization 187
What Is Visualization? 189
Reduction and Space 191
Visualization without Reduction 197
Artistic Media Visualization 199
Cultural Time Series 202
Beyond Information Visualization 203

9 Exploratory Media Analysis 207

Against Search 208
The Interface 213
Image Processing and Computer Vision 215
Using Image Features for Exploratory Media Analysis 218
Seeing versus Analyzing 221

10 Methods of Media Visualization 223

Image Montage 224
Sampling versus Summarization 232
Temporal Sampling 235
Spatial Sampling 236
Remapping 239

Conclusion: Can We Think without Categories? 245

Do We Want to "Explain" Culture? 247
Is the Goal of Cultural Analytics to Study Patterns? (Yes and No) 249
How to Think without Categories 251
Learning to See at a New Scale 254

Notes 255
Index 287