On the 27th of October 2020, we were pleased to have Timothy R. Tangherlini and Lev Manovich giving talks at the seminar on Cultural Analytics which was held in cooperation with DPU. The recording of the talks is available below.

Timothy R. Tangherlini, professor at UC Berkeley, gave the talk “Cultural Analytics and the Real (Fake) World: Tracing the Rise of Conspiracy Theories through Machine learning”. In this talk, Tangherlini demonstrates how the broader applicability of machine learning methods as well as different methods of scraping and cleaning data can be applied to the field of data driven analysis of culture. Tangherlini uses own recent work and projects to illustrate how these methods can be used to gain insight into the narrative frameworks underlying conversations in different social media forums. More specifically, Tangherlini uses COVID-19 discussions and the rise of conspiracies as examples.

Lev Manovich, professor at CUNY, presented his new book Cultural Analytics (MIT Press, October 2020), including concepts and methods that can be used for computational analysis of cultural data. Discussing the possibilities as well as limitations of computational methods, Manovich shares his perspective on how using these computational methods challenges our prevailing ideas about culture and how to study it.

We thank you all for joining the seminar. For those who didn't participate in the seminar, we hope you will enjoy watching the video below.