The explosive growth of cultural content on the web including social media, and the digitization work by museums, libraries, and companies make possible a fundamentally new paradigm for the study of cultural content. We can use computer-based techniques for data analysis and interactive visualization employed in sciences as well as the artistic techniques developed in media and digital art to analyze patterns and trends in massive visual data sets. Manovich calls this paradigm Cultural Analytics.

 In 2007 Manovich worked to established Software Studies Initiative (softwarestudies.com) at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and California Institute for Telecommunication and Information (Calit2) to begin putting this vision into practice. In this lecture he will show examples of our research including visualization of art, film, animation, video games, magazines, graphic design and other visual media. He will also discuss how working with massive cultural data sets  - such as one million manga pages - forces us to question most basic concepts of cultural analysis which we normally take for granted.

Lev Manovich's books include Software Takes Command (released under CC license, 2008), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (The MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001) which is hailed as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." He has written 90+ articles which have been reprinted over 300 times in 30+ countries. Manovich is a Professor in Visual Arts Department, University of California -San Diego, a Director of the Software Studies Initiative at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), and a Visiting Research Professor at Godsmith College (University of London), De Montfort University (UK) and College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales (Sydney). He is much in demand to lecture around the world, having delivered 300+ lectures, seminars and workshops during the last 10 years.