Visualization Methods for Media Studies

In the first decade of the 21 century, the researchers in the humanities and humanistic social sciences have gradually started to adopt computational and visualization tools. The majority of this work often referred as “digital humanities” has focused on textual data (e.g., literature, historical records, or social media) and spatial data (e.g., locations of people, places, or events). However, visual media have remained outside of the new computational paradigm. To fill this void, in 2007 I established the Software Studies Initiative at University of California, San Diego. Our first goal was to develop easy to use techniques for visualization and computational analysis of large collections of images and video suitable for researchers in media studies, the humanities, and the social sciences who do not have technical background, and to apply these techniques to progressively large media data sets. Our second goal was theoretical to examine existing practices and assumptions of visualization and computational data analysis (thus the name “Software Studies”), and articulate new research questions enabled by humanistic computational work with “big cultural data” in general, and visual media specifically.