Mapping Time: How Big Data and Visualization Makes Visible Evolution of Cultural Artifacts.

In 2007 we created Software Studies Initiative (www.softwarestudies.com) at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) to develop techniques and software tools that will enable humanists and social scientists work with large visual data sets. We call our approach “cultural analytics.” In my talk I will show how we use cultural analytics techniques to study temporal patterns in sets of cultural artifacts.

The examples include including one million manga pages, all paintings by Vincent van Gogh, films by Dziga Vertov, 4535 cover of Times magazine (1923-2009), and 20,000 pages of Science (1880-) and Popular Science (1872-) magazines. Use of visualization allows us for the first time to see the “shapes” of cultural time. Each visualization reveals the unexpected and intricate patterns of temporal change in a particular artifact - or our experience of these artifacts. Taken together, they demonstrate how we can visualize different kinds of gradual changes over time at a number of scales, ranging from a few seconds of an animated film to dozens of years of magazine and newspaper publication.