About Lev
Lev Manovich is a 56 year old author, designer, and teacher that comes from Moscow, USSR. In Moscow he studied architecture, painting, semiotics, and computer science. After completing school in Moscow he moved to New York in 1981. While in New York he completed his M.A. in Experimental Psychology and Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies. He also managed to work as a 3D computer animator from 1984 to 1992 while continuing his education.
Manovich is an author of several books on New Media, his most well known one being The Language of New Media. It was one of the first books teaching this subject. New media refers to content that is accessible on any type of digital device and it allows interactive user feedback and participation.
After his career in 3D computer animation, Manovich became a professor in 1992. Manovich previously taught New Media at UCLA, but currently he teaches computer science at CUNY (City University of New York), and is a visiting professor at a European Graduate School in Switzerland. His teaching and research centers around cultural analytics, data visualization, social computing, big data and society, digital humanities, history and theory of media, software studies, and digital art history.
Manovich is important to design because of his teaching on New Media as well as because of his current projects. In 2007 he began the Software Studies Initiative research lab. It is a computational analysis of large collections of data, usually images or videos. He calls it cultural analytics, a term he created, as he creates visualizations of cultural datasets. His work for this initiative has been commissioned by Google, the NY Public Library, MoMA, and many others.
On his website he lists twelve total New Media projects that he has created. Some of his most recent work includes the Selfiecity data set and the On Broadway interface. Both use images and social media posts to paint portraits of cities and places from a unique perspective.
Selfiecity uses instagram pictures from across the world to create a database for certain cities. The individual cities can be compared based on things such as how many people posting in a city are male or female, and how many people of each city are posting selfies with a head tilt in that location on average. It also analyzes which gender in a certain city is posting more selfies, breaking the information down by age, and it shows the general mood of selfies in each city based on facial expressions.
On Broadway is another of Lev’s projects that looks at 13 miles of Broadway street in New York City. It collects data from Instagram posts, Twitter posts, Google street view images, Foursquare check-ins, and taxi pick-ups and drop-offs that center around the location. Using this data Manovich created a interactive timeline that gives a glimpse into the lives of millions of people in the Broadway area. The timeline is broken down by various things such as time of day and the actual location with the 13 mile stretch.
Overall Lev Manovich’s work is important in our ever evolving interconnected and interactive world. His current work is among leading data collectives that provide meaningful breakdowns of data coming from individual social media posts across the world.
Sources: www.manovich.net, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Manovich