What is Cultural Data?

A broad overview of the various forms of cultural data

What is Cultural data? 🤔

In this episode, I’m going to write about cultural data: what it is and where you can find it. It’s a bit longer than I expected, but if you hang on till the end you’ll see a couple of videos :)

At its most simple, cultural data is described as any data related to art & humanities and culture studies. There are several useful ways to divide and segment cultural data. Cultural data may be qualitative or quantitative in nature and comes in various data types — textual, image and video, sound, numeric, and spatial. Moreover, this data can either be structured or unstructured.

Lev Manovich, the academic who developed the concept of “cultural analytics” in 2005, makes two helpful distinctions in relation to cultural data.

1. Historical cultural data sets 🎨

On one hand, there are data generated within the field of digital humanities. The data generated here is about traditional cultural heritage and artefacts and the digitization of collections in museums and libraries, both visual data and textual data. Manovich describes these as historical cultural data sets.