Applying cultural analytics to social networking sites: The case of deviantArt

Humanities and social sciences require new research approaches to deal with and to benefit from the explosion of digital media. Thanks to large scale data storage and processing, close reading of individual items can be supplemented with analysis of broader trends from massive amounts of data. Cultural Analytics (CA) is a recently developed methodology for the exploration of content and visual form in large image and video collections. It has already been applied to variety of media types, including TV programs, feature films, newspapers, and video games. However, until now these applications did not take into account the social context of media. In many cases, media artifacts under scrutiny are generated or used by people in a social setting, either in forms of (digital)communities, or in terms of social relations, which can be also analyzed as a valuable source of information. Social network analysis (SNA) is a set of methods for the analysis of human networks, including massive online social networks. For adapting cultural analytics methods to SNA, network, image and text analysis should be used in conjunction with domain-specific knowledge. This talk summarizes our research on deviantArt, the largest online arts community and positions cultural analytics within digital humanities.