cultural analytics

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the application of quantitative computational methods to the study of cultural phenomena — including literature, art history, film, music, and social media — at the large scale made possible by digital collections and processing power; associated with Lev Manovich and the Software Studies Initiative, cultural analytics uses data visualisation, machine learning, and statistical analysis to identify patterns in cultural production that are invisible at the scale of individual works; the field asks how style evolves over time, how cultural products are distributed across social space, and how the formal properties of cultural objects relate to their social contexts; cultural analytics has been critiqued for privileging the measurable aspects of cultural objects over their meaning and for reproducing the biases of the digitised collections on which it depends