'On Broadway' by Lev Manovich and GC Students Reimagines NYC Through Big Data

A new interactive data visualization, 'On Broadway,' featuring the work of Professor Lev Manovich (Computer Science) and an international team that includes four GC students, will be exhibited at the New York Public Library through January 2016.

The interactive installation examines contemporary life through images and information collected along the 13-mile length of Broadway in Manhattan, including 660,000 photographs shared on Instagram during a six-month period in 2014. Also displayed are Twitter posts, Four Square check-ins, Google Street View images, and data from 140 million taxi rides.

Through an online interface, users can navigate the street by unfolding or contracting stacks of data and images. The result is a new type of city view, created from the activities and media shared by hundreds of thousands of people.

'In Broadway' is part of "The Public Eye: 175 Years of Sharing Photography," the NYPL's first retrospective survey of photography that opened in December.

Manovich, who was recently named one of the year's most influential people by The Verge, is an artist and scholar whose projects explore patterns in vast aggregations of images shared on social media.

The GC doctoral students who contributed to 'On Broadway' are Agustin Indaco (Economics), Michelle Morales (Computational Linguistics), Emanuel Moss (Anthropology), and Alise Tifentale (Art History). The project will also yield several forthcoming reports and scholarly articles.
 
"Having students from across the GC participate in work exploring humanistic datasets, learning new data research methods, and discovering additional ways in which research can be disseminated in public was exactly what I was hoping for in joining the GC," says Manovich. "It is very satisfying to see this unfolding."