New Visions for the Book II: Remix

Part 3: Remix re-examined

See here for part 1 and here for part 2

Navas’s and Manovich’s thinking on remix seem to complement each other nicely. Where Navas analyses remix as discourse from a historical context, taking into account power-relations and the wider societal context shaping and triggering the rise of remix, Manovich takes a deep leap into the future, trying to think a world in which remix and the free flow of information through meta-media have become ubiquitous. He explores what this will mean for the way we produce, consume and analyse culture. Navas shows how remix has been an active force for change in the past, Manovich wants to explore how remix can still be an active stance to shape culture in the future. Both of them introduce the problem of fluidity and time and what this means for our (print-based) object-oriented society based on repetition of well-defined objects created by specific authors. Navas looks at the archive as a means to capture and stabilize cultural fluidity whilst at the same time creating reliability. Manovich looks at the way we can work with modularized recombinable data-sets to structure and control information flows. Both of them struggle with the dilemma of object-like thinking within a fluid environment. For both of them remix is or has become the defining characteristic of our digital culture.

Open Books

The dilemma’s Navas and Manovich touch-upon in their writing on culture at large can be directly related to our thinking surrounding the book and/or the future of our knowledge and communication system within academia. As Deleuze and Guattari argue in A Thousand Plateaus, a book is an assemblage, a multiplicity, it only exists in its connections. The paradox lies in the fact that a book can at the same time be seen as an organism as well as a body without organs, with neither a subject nor an object, as pure becoming:

“A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity—but we don’t know yet what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has been elevated to the status of a substantive.”¹

This very well captures the dilemma between a more closed off and object-oriented thinking of the book and a more fluid, open thinking of the book as a network of relations, making contact on and through the outside. The metaphor of remix and the influence of remix culture and theory on the way we look at the book is thus an interesting one. What happens with the order of the book as we embrace this more open thinking of the book as becoming, without a stable core, no fixed author and a yet unknown system of authority? The question is whether it is still useful in the digital age to think of the book—and our knowledge system based upon it—as a stable object and whether it is possible (and necessary!) to look at the book more as an object of possibilities, a fluid moment of potentiality and becoming. And this is where remix theory comes in handy, trying to think exactly what it means when objects increasingly become bodies without organs and only exist in their connections to each other.

The importance of Navas analysis of remix for the book and the knowledge system we have created around it, lies in the way he tries to cope with the problems of stability and authorship. Navas discusses three partway solutions that are, as I feel, of direct interest for scholarly communication and its battle with these notions in the digital age. First of all he explores the archive as a way of both stabilizing flow and creating a form of authority out of flux and continual updating. Next to that he proposes the role of s/he who selects (or curates or moderates) as an alternative for the author. In a way one can argue that this model of agency is already quite akin to scholarly communication, where selection of resources and referring to other sources, next to collection building, is part of the research and writing process of most scholars. Finally Navas tries to explore an alternative means of critique based on a fluctuating identity and culture that tries to resist commercialization by staying on the liminal threshold; one based on seizing the production tools, and on seizing control over repetition by means of representation. And Manovich argues for a similar potential, the potential of culture (and in this respect knowledge) creators to modularise data and make it adaptable within multiple media and various platforms, mirroring scientific developments with standardized meta-data and the semantic web. These are all interesting steps beyond thinking ‘the book’ status-quo, challenging scientific thinking to embrace process, sharing, and letting go of idealized ideas of authorship that can stand in the way of true creativity. Navas does an interesting job in starting to deconstruct them, to show how they increasingly become problematic in todays remix culture brought about by the possibilities of digital media.

But in many ways Navas (as well as Manovich) runs up against what seem to be the borders of this more process-oriented thinking. His alternative options are equally still very much connected to stability: the archive is needed to objectify culture; selection is another form of agency and does not (fundamentally) do away with authorship; and an alternative form of critique is still a critique focused on agency and on a (stabilized) object, on a structure of control. The question of keeping an archive also becomes increasingly problematic when objects become dispersed amongst various platforms. How do we keep track of an object or of data once it goes viral? And what about the role of the selector when selections can be made redundant, choices can be altered and undone by mass-collaborative, multi-user remixes and mash-ups? In what way are the solutions Navas and Manovich offer only temporary solutions to cope with a world that is and always has been in flux and is now increasingly unstoppable in all its fluid manifestations? In what way might it be necessary to let go of this object-like thinking and to start theorizing a perception of culture, science and critique that lets go of these fixed frames of thought and immerses the real of eternal becoming? Wouldn’t it be more interesting to perceive culture as a fluidity from which we abstract objects for the sake of analysis and clarity, instead of seeing culture as being build up out of separate building blocks and recombinable data-modules? Isn’t it time to start thinking a knowledge and communication system based on continual updates and change, without a stable core, both as its object and subject? And is this even possible? In what way does the concept of the open book present us with a paradox in this respect?

Performative inflections

Remix Theory and many remix theorists (like for example Navas, Manovich, Lawrence Lessig, Paul Miller a.k.a DJ Spooky, Mark Amerika) have one more important aspect in common. Many of them experiment with different kinds of remix-practices themselves. In many ways their work poses a challenge to the often perceived dichotomy between theory and practice. Navas remixes his older writings, updates them and uses various media (amongst others film) to bring his message across. By using a blog as his main outlet he connects to other thinkers and consumers. On his blog he also acts as a curator or selector, bringing together other texts on remix. Furthermore he practices an interdisciplinary practice mixing his theoretical writing with his curatorial and art practices concerning remix. In Navas words:

“Remix Theory is designed to move towards a remix of itself, by recombining much of the material that is archived to put to test the possibilities of Remix. This will become transparent as the database grows, and specific projects are developed. The site is designed to host, archive and promote projects which explore the current possibilities of Remix online and offline; it is prepared to become a repository of collaborations with different people and institutions.”2

Manovich approach to his work in many ways mirrors software production. He brings out various versions of his work, unedited, and in many ways “unfinished”, waiting for feedback from the community after/from which they can subsequently be updated. His books can also clearly be seen as a remix of his various articles. Furthermore his scientific method can be seen as one in which media and methods from the hard sciences get mixed up and applied to ‘traditional’ humanities subjects within his cultural analytics framework.

Remixing knowledge

What is so interesting about remix for academic knowledge production, consumption and dissemination? I see remix as an exciting way to initiate a ‘thinking beyond the book’. Digital texts and books contain the potential to transform our knowledge system or the way we think and relate to knowledge. This ‘thinking beyond the book’ is not something that only became possible with the rise of the digital. It has always been part of the way we have envisaged and constructed our knowledge system.  There are however some ‘knowledge practices’ we have adopted and grown accustomed to, such as authorship, stability and authority. Digital and online media offer the potential to increasingly critique these notions where thinking a knowledge system beyond these notions increasingly seems to become a practical reality. Remix is a liminal concept in this way; it stands on the border of these customary ways of thinking. It shakes them up. It poses a potential crisis.

Remix Theory can be seen as a new way to critically think the potentiality of the book, as a way to think beyond the book, as a strategy to explore its multiple potentialities, to challenge established notions like stability, identity and materiality that are all bound up with (printed) books and at the same time with our current conception and practice of knowledge.

Remix is a cultural and a political phenomenon, it can be seen as a resistance against essentialisms. It can be used as means to critique the essentialist doctrines at work within the Humanities. Remix Theory can be a framework to question issues of authorship, stability, authority and originality within these disciplines and within science at large, just as much as it has been a framework to question these in for example music, art and poetry. Finally, the way it mixes theory and practical methodology, and the way it mixes media can be seen as both a commentary on and an inspiration for the (digital) humanities. And although, as I have argued before, it does not fundamentally challenge or alter these concepts, it is a (necessary) step in the right direction, towards a more fluid conception of the humanities.

 

1 See: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

2 See: http://remixtheory.net/?page_id=2

 

New Visions for the Book II: Remix

Part 2 – Lev Manovich

Lev Manovich is a professor of Visual Arts, at the University of California, San Diego, specialized in new media, software and digital culture. Manovich directs the The Software Studies Initiative where he practices cultural analytics. Similar to Navas, he has theorized and applied the concept of remix frequently in his papers and books. However, although at some points overlapping, Manovich position on remix differs in specific ways from Navas’s where his focus seems to lie more on the functional possibilities of remix than on the dialectical power structures that have surrounded and triggered remix. In his article ‘remixability’ (2005) Manovich explores Dybwad’s concept of collaborative remixability, which is build upon the aspects of shareability and recombinable information and media. Manovich mostly focusses on the way both the production and the consumption (and analysis) of culture has changed with the coming of new media. Through the development of software, remix has become a common condition for our digital culture. Symptomatic to remix culture is the introduction of the time-aspect. As Manovich states there are no longer senders and receivers of information in the classical sense, they are only temporary ‘reception points’ in information’s path through remix. The concept of modularity is also important in Manovich’s writing on remix, where he sketches an utopian future in which culture would function as Lego-blocks:

“Will the separation between libraries of samples and “authentic” cultural works blur in the future? Will the future cultural forms be deliberately made from discrete samples designed to be copied and incorporated into other projects? It is interesting to imagine a cultural ecology where all kinds of cultural objects regardless of the medium or material are made from Lego-like building blocks. The blocks come with complete information necessary to easily copy and paste them in a new object – either by a human or machine. A block knows how to couple with other blocks – and it even can modify itself to enable such coupling. The block can also tell the designer and the user about its cultural history – the sequence of historical borrowings which led to the present form. And if original Lego (or a typical twentieth century housing project) contains only a few kinds of blocks that make all objects one can design with Lego rather similar in appearance, computers can keep track of unlimited number of different blocks. At least, they can already keep track of all the possible samples we can pick from all cultural objects available today.”¹

With this quite instrumental vision of culture, Manovich seems to disregard the tension that is created in ‘remix as discourse’ which Navas so eagerly defends. Furthermore on the one hand Manovich claims to let go of the idea of culture as finalized objects (using the metaphor of information running like a stream of water down a mountain, branching out in an immense variety of interconnected streams) but at the same time he does stress the importance of modular blocks of data culture, thereby in a way holding on to the same essentialist notions he tries to deconstruct, only on another scale. He does not find a way out of this object-like thinking although he suggests to do so: ‘In this scenario, any well-defined part of any finished cultural object can automatically become a building block for new objects in the same medium’ This triggers the question: Is an object finished when it at the same time constitutes a building block for another object? Manovich plays with more of these paradoxes in his thinking, for instance where he makes a plea for standardisation of culture via modularity whilst at the same time leaving space for diversity: ‘ In other words, if pre-computer modularity leads to repetition and reduction, post-computer modularity can produce unlimited diversity.‘

Modular ecology

Many of Manovich ideas devised from his ‘look from the future’ as he calls it, can be seen as honourable convictions focussed on ‘helping bits move around more easily‘. This ecology in which remix and modularity are reality is a method for Manovich to devise a new way with which we can perform cultural analysis. Nonetheless, although standardisation as a strategy and a means to make culture more free and shareable is a goal worth pursuing, by not targeting the context surrounding cultural production and consumption, Manovich neglects the political and economic conditions that for a large part confine and determine the possibility of sharing. In this respect his approach seems a bit naïve. The problem of copyright for instance hardly gets touched upon in his writings on remix. He seems to ignore the fact that the Internet and digital media are no free playing grounds but are for a large part defined by proprietary cultural entities and interests.

Manovich sees a lot of potential for the Internet (as Navas does) where it, as he states, has put the production tools in the hands of the prosumers: ‘ Culture has always been about remixability – but now this remixability is available to all participants of Internet culture.’ But is it actually that easy? Is there more freedom to culture in the digital realm? Although we might now have more control with respect to the production tools, as Navas has made clear we are still immersed in platforms that control our data flows and feed off the data we produce. At what price does the possibility of remixability really come about and in what way and from which perspective should we look at it as a liberating force? Manovich does however not completely ignore problems of power-relations and copyright. In ‘What comes after remix‘ he remarks:

“Yet we are left with an interesting paradox: while in the realm of commercial music remixing is officially accepted, in other cultural areas it is seen as violating the copyright and therefore as stealing. So while filmmakers, visual artists, photographers, architects and Web designers routinely remix already existing works, this is not openly admitted, and no proper terms equivalent to remixing in music exist to describe these practices.”²

But although he does mention these issues he does not seem to draw the consequences of these circumstances for the possibility of his larger theory. Manovich does not fundamentally debate remix in a critical contextual manner, although he does define it in his book Software Takes Command as being ‘the cultural logic of global capitalism’. This lack of a critical approach mainly has to do with the fact that Manovich wants to look beyond the present situation and power structures to a possible utopian remix future. As he states, he is more interested in showing how software has enhanced the possibility of blending in culture more easy: “To use the terms of Roland Barthes, we can say that if modernist collage always involved a “clash” of elements, electronic and software collage also allows for “blend.”

Deep remixability

Manovich tries to explore how with the coming of software a shift in the nature of what constitutes a cultural “object” has taken place, where cultural content often no longer has finite boundaries: it is no longer received by the user but it is traversed and/or in constructed and managed. In this way for Manovich culture is a product that still gets constructed both by the maker as well as the consumer. However, the real revolution lies not in the possession of the production tools but in the possibility to exchange information between media, what he in Software Takes Command calls the concept of ‘deep remixability’. As Manovich argues in ‘Remix and Remixability’, culture is actively being modularised by users to make it more adaptive.

“ On the other hand, what seems to be happening is that the “users” themselves have been gradually “modularising” culture. In other words, modularity has been coming into modern culture from the outside, so to speak, rather than being built-in, as in industrial production.”³

And this is where Manovich gets more to the point. For him culture is not modular, it is (increasingly) made modular—however, he still does not address the tension here where standardization and modularization could also be seen as an attempt at commodification and commercialisation of culture, as much as it can be seen as an active act of prosumer resistance (as Navas has already shown: remix has a double face)—and what Manovich is interested in his in how this modularity is increasingly being extended to media themselves. Manovich introduces the term deep remixability to show how remix of various media has become possible (a common software-based environment) next to a remix of the methodology of these media:

“Software production environment allows designers to remix not only the content of different media, but also their fundamental techniques, working methods, and ways of representation and expression”⁴

The future Manovich sees for human culture with the increase of pre-fabricated modularity is a future of softwarization: media will become remediated in the ultimate remediation machine: the computer. According to Manovich this will lead to a new aesthetics and ultimately to a new species. This for him is the power of technology and remix culture, the power to actively change and shape culture. As Manovich states, we need smaller re-combinable parts for this:

“Remix culture demands not selfcontained aesthetic objects or self-contained records of reality but smaller units – parts that can be easily changed and combined with other parts in endless combinations”⁵

Where Manovich calls remix the basic logic of cultural production, culture is transformed from objects to data in his vision, the difference being mainly scale and modularity. In ‘Generation Flash‘, Manovich argues for a modernist viewpoint (though keeping the skepticism of post-modernism) by declaring a preference for as he calls it a ‘belief in science and rationality, emphasis on efficiency and basic forms, idealism and heroic spirit of modernism’. Manovich vision on remix is a vision of how he wants culture to become, to be shaped, to be prosumed and analysed. The question is however whether by focussing on data mining and visualizations and on thinking culture as data we are not running the risk of fixating on studying meaningless vessels. Although Manovich defends his approach as one of complementarity, of expansion, the question remains, do we want to understand culture or do we want to analyse utopia?

 

1 See: www.manovich.net/DOCS/Remixability_2.doc

2 See: http://remixtheory.net/?p=169

3 See: www.manovich.net/DOCS/Remix_modular.doc

4 See: softwarestudies.com/softbook/manovich_softbook_11_20_2008.doc

5 See: softwarestudies.com/softbook/manovich_softbook_11_20_2008.doc

APE 2010: The Semantic Desktop and the Article of the Future

During the second and third day of the APE conference three presentations were given which focused on services that would aid the information worker through the information overload. They were all based on filtering out the essential information through web based services and interfaces centered on the (scholarly) user of these information resources. Andreas Dengel gave a presentation on the semantic desktop – a device which can serve to supplement a user’s memory. As Dengel states, in our information overloaded society we need instruments that help us to find and get the relevant information we need. One of the main problems in this respect is that we need to know more than we may remember. As Dengel states, the semantic desktop was thus designed to help the knowledge worker find and order the relevant information. As he says, today many activities are focused on single information items. What we have on our desktop is thus a kind of temporarily memory. The question is how we can make this into an active agent, into a vivid Memex. How can we use modern technology to implement something similar? For computers are most of all lacking in the capabilities of human knowledge to be associative and to put things into perspective. Computers can read the information they have to process but they cannot understand it. In this respect there is a cut in our thinking between our minds and the desktop. A document can however also be perceived as a key, which, while reading, opens a system of links to other documents, to events, locations and tasks.

Referring to Kant’s well known adage ‘imaginations without terms are blind and terms without imagination are empty’, Dengel states that in the semantic triangle we refer to the reality (what is going on), the signs and symbols we know to represent that reality and our imagination (what we read). RDF’s, or the enhanced resource description framework provides the basis for describing meaning via ontologies. An ontology is in this respect nothing more than a vocabulary to express facts about the world: subject, predicate, object. In this respect a fact is expressed as a subject-object triple. These are entities that represent something. Subjects, predicates and objects are given as names for entities. But the question is, how can we provide a shared vocabulary?

As Dengel explains, he semantic desktop offers an evolutionary approach towards the semantic web. It is a form of ontology based document understanding in which the individual network of thoughts leads to a multi-dimensional and multi-perspective organization of content. For this reason, amongst others, we need to think of new concepts of archiving. The semantic desktop works via hyperlinks where the email content is related to existing knowledge via semantic hyperlinks. It can be defined as followed:

“A Semantic Desktop is a device in which an individual stores all her digital information like documents, multimedia and messages. These are interpreted as Semantic Web resources, each is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and all data is accessible and queryable as RDF graph. Resources from the web can be stored and authored content can be shared with others. Ontologies allow the user to express personal mental models and form the semantic glue interconnecting information and systems. Applications respect this and store, read and communicate via ontologies and Semantic Web protocols. The Semantic Desktop is an enlarged supplement to the user’s memory.”

The final problem remains however, according to Dengel, how we can integrate this technology in an efficient way into Gutenberg’s world. You can find more information on the semantic desktop here. 

A second presentation by IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, focused on Elsevier’s article of the future, which takes on a task-oriented view to get away from the paper paradigm (you can find some examples of such a future article at www.cell.com and also by looking here). Elsevier’s article of the future, very much like the semantic desktop described before, looks at the context of readers and the tasks readers perform. According to Aalbersberg, instead of adding the data to the text we could better integrate the growing amount of data in the main content/context because the amount of data is growing to fast. In this respect we need to work with communities, we need to be user centered to find out what they want to do with the data. In the article of the future every article gets a tabbed view (like a table of contents, but it also at the same time gives an ordered view on the parts). Most interesting is that every article gets a graphical abstract which represents the main message via visual input. Key results (what is really achieved in this article and what is new) are highlighted. Audio and video materials are used to explain the context (for instance via video abstracts). The article of the future also caters to the multitasking individual where one can be reading the text and have the audio/video on in the background. The author-affiliation is also highlighted, where the institute and the author determine the credibility of the article. According to Elsevier’s user research the most popular item in their article of the future would be the clickable figure which could be used to navigate to sub-sections via click and jump. Unfortunately the technology has not yet advanced far enough to offer this function as of yet Aalbersberg states. For at the moment it still entails way to much work for the author and it delays production.

Elsevier’s article of the future also concentrates on a data-focused presentation or summary where one can get an independent view of text, figures and (zoomable) captions. Supplementary data is not presented as a separate file but can on request be integrated (it slides in) into the article. There is also the possibility to do some real-time reference analysis, where references can be sortified by date, author or journal. One can even see the whole sentences where those references are being made so that people can really see the context. As Aalbersberg explains, the prototype of this experiment was very much based on the present form of the article (so not on the semantic possibilities). The idea was thus to really make a better presentation of the current article. 

Dan Pollock from Nature.com presented a similar experiment based on searching, discovering and sharing for and of research results. Nature also focuses on a user centered world where the journal is increasingly being deconstructed and a disintermediation is taking place between the author and the publisher. As Pollock states, Nature’s main goal is to improve search by focusing on precision. By offering Open Search (based on XML, bibliographical and index searching) this offers new ways for machines to share search results and to build functions on top of these results. Nature also focuses on a revised user interface/article presentation. Pollock also mentions resources like NatureEvents, semantic markup services (where one can click on compounds to enter entity pages), and Nature’s focus on sharing and mobile devices, like for instance the Nature application they offer for the iPhone. According to their user research the articles presented via this app on the iPhone read quite good. Nature also offers offline services where the article can be consulted directly from the iPhone without a direct Internet connection. Another service Nature offers focuses on blog aggregation, giving a credibility stamp. As Pollock states, what Nature does, is they aggregate blogs and clean up their references and hyperlinks. In this way they make the content useful, making use of their function as publishers. Nature also involves the user by integrating Mashups based on Google wave: through real-time collaboration and editing in the cloud via the Igor application in which they focus on authoring productivity tools. In the future Nature wants to take this sharing aspect even further using User Generated Content on the (online) Nature Network and by offering a Nature workbench, a personalized webpage on Nature.com (alla iGoogle).

            These and other talks delivered at APE 2010 will soon be made available at http://river-valley.tv/

Digital Scholarship

Christine Borgman is one of my scholarly heroines; when it comes to her fine nose for current developments in e-scholarship and digital information retrieval and her thorough and concise way of communicating (alas, she is a specialist in scholarly communication) these issues via monographs, articles and lectures, she definitely belongs to my scholarly all-star gallery. Her latest book Scholarship in the Digital Age, was an indispensable resource for me when writing my Master’s thesis on the Scholarly Communication System and Open Access.

So I was really glad I found this lecture (which I can’t embed, sorry) by Christine Borgman online, in which she discusses most of her main topics: cyberinfrastructure and e-science, Open Access, the data deluge, collaborations and intellectual property and the scholarly communication value chain. The lecture is entitled Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet, and was delivered at Columbia University.

 I also found, via Open Access News, this podcast with Alma Swan, Key Perspectives main consultant on Open Access, Scholarly Communication and Academic Publishing. In this podcast, conducted by Sara Bartlett from Talis, she discusses amongst others the current state and difficulties concerning e-books or digital monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the main subject of my current research for the OAPEN project. I especially like the way she recommends in the end that we need to stop the ‘pillarization’ in the Open Access focus, as OA journals, OA books and OA data are mainly targeted as separate issues by separate initiatives, whilst they need to be combined to create a truly interconnected collaborative scholarship.

Alma Swan also maintains a weblog, Optimal Scholarship and has been interviewed before by Richard Poynder. You can find that interview here.

Culture is Data

By Anne Helmond (cc) non-commercial name attribution

Paradiso was enlightened last Sunday by the presence of a true Digital Media apostle: Lev Manovich, the renowned professor of Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego, came to give a lecture on Cultural Analytics. His lecture was part of a one day conference, Archive 2020, organized by the Dutch expertise centre for e-culture, Virtueel Platform.

Manovich used the intriguing title Activating the archive or data dandy meets data mining, in which he referenced Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink who previously described the fetish of data collection by individuals and institutions. Manovich’s talk centered on the massive digitization efforts of existing cultural assets by institutions all over the world, from ARTstor to Google Books and BBC motion gallery (and even China’s CCTV). As Manovich argues, no human being will ever be able to keep track of all this data. However increasingly measures are taken in which the digital preservation of cultural assets is turning into an obligatory act (hence the fetish reference). Moreover this institutionalized digitization is accompanied since, let’s say 2005, by the rise of huge amounts of user generated content. As Manovich mentions, the number of images uploaded every week to Flickr is likely to be larger than all objects contained in all art museums of the world. This development sees a parallel expansion of the professional cultural universe. This rapid growth of a professional universe can mainly be seen in newly globalized countries foremost due to the growth of software tools which made for the instant availability of cultural news. Everyone now has access to the same ideas, information and tools: there are no more centers and provinces. Manovich even argues that the students, cultural professionals and governments in newly globalized countries are often more ready to embrace the latest ideas than their equivalents in the “old centers” of the world.

By Anne Helmond (cc) non-commercial name attribution

All in all this has lead to an explosive growth of cultural production. This has again lead to some intriguing questions and problems: “What does it mean to be a (video) artist today and what does it mean to do cultural criticism in such a world of superabundance? Before cultural theorists and historians generated theories and concepts about relative small data sets. But how can you track “global digital cultures” with billions of cultural objects? As Manovich argues, we need some new methods to track these developments in our cultural imagination. We need a new methodology for the study of cultural processes and artifacts – including cultural production, sharing and consumption. As Manovich explains, to analyze large cultural data sets of cultural information we can apply tools already employed in the sciences to analyze big data. We can create interactive visualizations and dynamic maps of large cultural data sets to find new patterns – and to generate new theoretical questions. Traditional boundaries disappear as visualization can be seen as esthetic statements about the world, so as forms of art (see for instance Stefanie Posavec’s literary organism). Forms of cultural data mining are already starting to rise up as we are slowly shifting from a world of new media into a world of “more media”. In this respect Manovich states ‘culture has become data’. This data (including media content and people’s creative and social activity around this content, i.e. social media) can be and will be mined and visualized.

Manovich explains his new methodology of ‘cultural analytics’ as the use of data mining and interactive visualizations of large sets of cultural data in the humanities context. Manovich introduced the idea of cultural analytics first in 2005 and you can find more information about this method at softwarestudies.com.

Manovich argues that if you have an interesting idea today, you can be sure someone has the same idea somewhere else. Thus it makes no more sense to experience and study these single events. We need to start studying trends and patterns in culture instead of individual projects of ideas and concepts. We need to look at these projects in a larger context of global cultural production.

But how do you put this in practice? We need to represent and work with individual cultural objects and then work to larger and larger datasets. The key differences between existing work in culture visualization and Manovich’s approach, lies in the fact that most research projects now are driven by the existing data. Manovich wants to create techniques which can be used for much larger data sets. In contrast his methodology uses the computational analysis to generate new metadata. In this way one now creates the metadata around the objects, not the patterns inside. Manovich proposes to appropriate software from hard sciences and use them to look at work of arts and cultural works.

He gives examples of a few research projects he has worked on focusing on modern art. You can for example use software to analyze large datatsets of paintings. In this way a computer can ‘see’ whether a painting is realist or modernist (by measuring grayscale, particles, forms etc). Along these lines you can analyze the development of visual culture over time. By means of image processing you can describe the paintings qualitatively in terms of numbers. We can now make new distinctions on the basis of these outcomes; a trend line. In this way one generates new questions. As Manovich states, this method is not about answering old questions. Instead it offers new visions concerning the development of modernism from realism to modernism.

Manovich did a similar project which analyzed 165 paintings by Mark Rothko using a visual super computer to extract computational data. These are all examples of easier and sometimes more productive ways to look at culture. We can get a lot of data from these methods, Manovich says. Also, born digital media is highly interactive, and it is easy to record user interaction and user statistics. We can now use these techniques to ask different questions. This could be very interesting for, for instance, reception theory; we can now analyze the actual patterns of interaction with culture.

Manovich also expanded his analysis to movies, analyzing the variance in shot lengths in movies showing a “development over time”. The average shot length of feature films between 1900-2008 gives some interesting insides into the differences in cultural history in different countries, comparing France, the Soviet Union, the US etc. (in which the Russians proved most extreme or avant-garde prone with Vertov at the one extreme and Tarkovksi at the other…).

These kind of tools would also be able to ‘go around’ the canon. Where in normal science the focus is mostly on the canon, now we can do art history about larger contexts. But unfortunately it is mostly the canon that has been digitized. We should thus expand the canon in our digitization efforts, argues Manovich. But we can not archive everything…Therefore Manovich states we should archive equal amounts of ‘important’ canonical art and ‘random art’ to balance, in his words, ‘the important stuff wit the non important stuff’.

The critique of the audience focused mainly on the problem of how one can quantify qualitative issues? For Manovich seems to propose a shift from qualitative to quantitative analysis. As Manovich replied, quite pragmatically: it is going to happen anyway, it is what social scientists are doing. With these techniques we can do more than with a simple manually descriptive qualitative analysis. For computers can analyze things we cannot: they can find similarities and differences in similar and likely objects. And in a way the question stays ‘how do we see?’ The brain is also a kind of computer, Manovich says. Do we analyze that different from a computer?

But, on the other hand, won’t we loose a sense of meaning if we analyze culture like a thing? Manovich argues that this is of course a complementary method, we should not throw away our other ways of establishing meaning. It is a way of expanding them. And it is also an important expansion, for how is one going to ask about the meaning of large datasets? We need to combine the traditionally humanities approach of interpretation with digital techniques to find out more. And again, meaning is not the only thing to look at. It is also about creating an experience. Patterns are the new real of our society.

You can find an interview with Lev Manovich held by Virtueel Platform here and an article explaining cultural analytics here.