How can we see a billion images? What analytical methods can we bring to bear on the astonishing scale of digital culture – the billions of photographs shared on social media every day, the hundreds of millions of songs created by twenty million musicians on Soundcloud, the content of four billion Pinterest boards?

In his new book Cultural Analytics (MIT, 2020), Professor Lev Manovich (City University of New York) poses these and other questions and presents concepts and methods for computational analysis of cultural data. Drawing on more than a decade of research and projects from the directorship of his own Cultural Analytics Lab, Manovich offers a gentle, non-technical introduction to the core ideas of data analytics and discusses the ways that our society uses data and algorithms.