“Instagram and Contemporary Image” (2016) is a new book by Lev Manovich.

The book methods combine traditional qualitative approaches of humanities and computational analysis of 16 millions of Instagram photos in 17 global cities carried out in Manovich’s lab (softwarestudies.com) since 2012.

The book chapters arebeing released online under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International…

Millions of people around the world today use digital tools and platforms to create and share sophisticated cultural artifacts. This book focuses on one such platform: Instagram. It places Instagram image culture within a rich cultural and historical context, including history of photography, cinema, graphic design, and social media, contemporary design trends, music video, and k-pop. At the same it uses Instagram as a window into the identities of first truly global generation connected by common social media platforms, programming languages, and visual aesthetics. The book also demonstrates how humanistic close reading and computational analysis of large datasets can work together by drawing on the work in Manovich’s lab with 16 million Instagram photos shared in 17 large cities worldwide since 2012.

Dr. Lev Manovich is the author and editor of eight books includingData Drift (RIXC, 2015), ( Software Takes Command, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (The MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001) which was described as “the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.” He appeared on the list of“25 People Shaping the Future of Design” in 2013 and the list of “50 Most Interesting People Building the Future” in 2014. Manovich is a Professor of Computer Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Software Studies Lab that uses methods from computer science, media design and humanities to analyze big cultural data such as millions of Instagram images. The lab’s most recent projects were commissioned by MoMA, New Public Library, and Google. Selfiecity won Golden Award in Best Visualization Project category in the global competition in 2014; On Broadway project received Silver Award in the same category in 2015.