Dr. Melvin L. DeFleur Distinguished Lecture Series (Visualizing Instagram: How to Study Big Social Data Without Using Numbers)

Dr. Lev Manovich (Professor at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and founder and director of Software Studies Initiative) will be presenting the Spring 2015 Distinguished Lecture. What can we learn about societies from analyzing billions of photographs and videos shared on social networking sites? How can analysis of big data focus on the variability and differences as opposed to the aggregation of data? Can we use interactive visualization to explore massive visual data sets without using numbers or predefined research questions? In this presentation, Dr. Manovich will discuss these questions using examples of recent projects in his lab where he analyzes 2.3 million Instagram photos from 13 global cities (http://phototrails.net), compare selfies (http://selfiecity.net/), and create an interactive visualization of a city life that does not use any maps (on-broadway.nyc).

When 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm on Thursday, April 9, 2015
Location School of Management Building (595 Commonwealth Ave.) in Room 105