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NMS0010.1177/14614448211035118new media & societyBook Review

Book Review

new media & society

Book Review
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DOI: 10.1177/14614448211035118
https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211035118
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Lev Manovich, Cultural Analytics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020; xi + 336 pp.; ISBN
9780262037105, $35.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Felipe Núñez-Sánchez , Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain

Lev Manovich’s latest book starts from an indisputable reality: the scale that contempo-
rary cultural production has reached cannot be systematically analyzed with traditional
research tools and techniques. To this end, Manovich proposes the adoption of a new
hybrid paradigm, capable of combining humanities, social sciences, and data science. A
new analytical model applied to cultural parameters through computational science. He
calls this field of study “cultural analytics.”
Manovich is an eclectic theorist, a pioneer in the use of data science for the analysis
of visual culture, capable of combining computation, media theory, and art history in his
work. He is a polymath in an increasingly specialized academic world. The publication
of The Language of New Media (Manovich, 2001) made him an influential figure in the
field of communication. He offered the first rigorous and systematic theory of what, at
the beginning of the current century, were regarded as the new media. The closest prec-
edent to his current lines of research can be found in Software Takes Command (Manovich,
2013), where he discusses how the development of digital interfaces has changed the
traditional idea of media. Following this line of thought, Cultural Analytics, published in
October 2020, materializes a project he has been developing for years.
In this latest work, Manovich brings together more than a decade of research to pre-
sent concepts and methods of computational analysis of cultural data, with a particular
focus on visual media. Throughout the pages, he shows how cultural analytics, through
quantitative methods, complements and extends the development of classic sociological
and philosophical theories, such as Pierre Bourdieu’s work on taste, Georg Simmel’s
theory of fashion, or Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s concept of the culture
industry.
The book, divided into three parts, devotes its first chapters to discuss the shift from
“new media” of the 1990s to “more media” of the 2000s, showcasing the evidence of
why computational methods are needed to analyze contemporary culture. Today, cultural
production has reached an enormous speed of appearance and reproduction, mainly due
to user-generated content. Billions of people share cultural content and interact daily
with it on the web, from photos and videos to text and music. The large scale of this data
2 new media & society 00(0)

offers researchers the possibility of finding new cultural patterns. However, this chal-
lenge requires a new approach, capable of questioning the current concepts and methods
of cultural analysis.
Undoubtedly, these techniques based on big data are already very present in our daily
lives. They are fundamentally applied by the new cultural industry platforms, such as
Netflix or Spotify. Manovich calls these practices “media analytics” (p. 54). They share
the same core with cultural analytics: large-scale computational analysis of cultural arti-
facts and behaviors. However, their goals and motivations are different, as the former are
driven by pragmatic business principles, such as targeting recommendations or creating
content tailored to users. While humanities and computational social science research
have been analyzing relatively small samples and focusing on historical and statistical
data sets, the platform industry captures millions of pieces of data that are analyzed in
real-time.
The second part of the book outlines a typology of objects of study that researchers
can use to examine digital culture in its variants of digital media and artifacts, online, and
physical behaviors, interactions, and events. To analyze these objects, we can create
large data sets about them, but if we do not narrow them down from samples, we would
end up with immeasurable results. Therefore, instead of being guided by criteria based
on ideology, tradition, and intuition, Manovich believes that statistical sampling tech-
niques are essential to find cultural patterns. A data set as large as possible will not only
ensure that, but it will also allow us to observe the distribution of trends and identify
outliers, which may be more interesting. Thus, while computational and statistical meth-
ods, as Manovich acknowledges, do not guarantee more objectivity, they can help to
confront assumptions, biases, and stereotypes.
Finally, the third part provides the conceptual basis needed to explore cultural data
sets using data visualizations, and then it focuses on recently developed methods for
exploring image and video collections. Traditionally, information visualization has been
able to reveal patterns and structures, but it has paid the price of extreme reduction. Now,
the use of algorithms capable of processing very large data sets makes it possible to gen-
erate dynamic categories that are not explicitly defined. This implies that new cultural
research projects can combine two directions of analysis: either starting from previous
categories, or delegating the construction of categories to computational processes:

Visualization methods allow us to explore large collections of visual cultural artifacts or

samples from a cultural process without measuring them. In other words, we do not have to use
either numbers or categories (. . .) Far from being only one of the tools in quantitative cultural
analysis, visualization is an alternative analytical paradigm. (p. 184)

Precisely, the final reflection of the book revolves around the question of whether we can
think without categories. In his answer, Manovich remains cautious and recognizes that,
although we can unravel cultural patterns on a large scale, we must not forget that cul-
tural data can only account for some aspects of cultural artifacts and their reception.
Thus, the unique aspects of each cultural object, for the author, are as relevant as those
shared characteristics that identify statistical patterns.
Book Review 3

We can say that Cultural Analytics is a book about the new methodologies of our era,
which intend to conceptualize and theorize about new realities of cultural analysis based
on computational techniques. Its greatest virtue is, in my view, the ability to exemplify
and refer in each explanation to research works, programs, and analysis companies or
cultural databases, which are a reference for carrying out new research. It is an accessible
book for those who are new to statistics or data science and will undoubtedly become
basic reading for any curriculum that wants to embrace quantitative analysis in the study
of cultural phenomena.

ORCID iD
Felipe Núñez-Sánchez https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5898-700X

References
Manovich L (2001) The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Manovich L (2013) Software Takes Command. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.