Shawn Graham recently pointed me (and a number of colleagues!) to a new paper entitled ‘Computer vision, human senses, and language of art’ by Lev Manovich (2020) in a tweet in which he asked what we made of it … so, challenge accepted!
Lev Manovich is, of course, a professor of computer science and a prolific author, focusing on cultural analytics, artificial intelligence, and media theory, amongst other things. In this particular paper, he proposes that numbers, and their associated analytical methods, offer a new language for describing cultural artefacts. The idea that this is novel may be news to those who have been engaged in quantitative analyses across the humanities since before the introduction of the computer, but aspects of his argument go further than this. The actual context of the paper is as yet unclear since it is online first and not yet assigned to a volume. That said, a number of other open access online first papers in AI & Society seem to address similar themes, so one might imagine it to be a contribution to a collection of digital humanities-related papers concerning images and computer vision.
It’s an interesting paper, not least since – as Manovich says himself (p2) – it presents the perspective of an outside observer writing about the application of technological methods within the humanities. Consequently it can be tempting to grump about how he “doesn’t understand” or “doesn’t appreciate” what is already done within the humanities, but it’s perhaps best to resist that temptation as far as possible.
