Recensione a L. Manovich, Cultural Analytics. L'analisi computazionale della cultura

In Cultural Analytics, Manovich's reflection considers the centrality of aesthetics in reference to the transformations of technology, the importance of the semantic evolutions of the so-called interfaces and the need to develop a sort of poetics of the archive, both in an artistic perspective and in the capacity to consider the interactive practices between users and technological environments, in a constant and growing dialectic of prosumerization, which sees the distinction between those who produce and those who consume media and information content, between spectator and author, becoming increasingly blurred. The book is divided into three large sections. In the first part there are different examples and analyzes of computational cultural analytics and the development of the transition from the "new media" of the 1990s to the "more media" of the 2000s. The second part deals with the definition of the types of cultural data and the techniques necessary to be able to represent cultural processes as computational data, reflecting on the need to do more and more research on methodologies and models of data representation and visualization, to define a " scale of digital culture”. In the third and final part, some basic concepts are proposed to be able to use data visualization as an opportunity to explore enormous cultural datasets, combining statistical rigor with aesthetic and artistic creativity.