[3] Manovich is the founder and director of the Cultural Analytics Lab (called Software Studies Initiative 2007-2016),[4] which pioneered use of data science and data visualization for the analysis of massive collections of images and video (cultural analytics).

[9] Manovich's latest academic book Cultural Analytics was published in 2020 by the MIT Press.

[10] Manovich was born in Moscow, USSR, where he studied painting, architecture, computer science, and semiotics.

[21] His book, The Language of New Media (2001), covers many aspects of cultural software: for example, he identifies a number of key tools or processes (he calls them 'operations') that underpin commercial software from word processing to video editing programs.

[9] In "New Media from Borges to HTML" (2001), Manovich describes the eight definitions of "new media":[16] His digital art project Soft Cinema[22] was commissioned by ZKM for the exhibition Future Cinema (2002–03); traveling to Helsinki, Finland, and Tokyo, Japan, in April 2003.

A "cinema," that is, in which human subjectivity and the variable choices made by custom software combine to create films that can run infinitely without ever exactly repeating the same image sequences, screen layouts and narratives.

Each Soft Cinema run offers a unique viewing experience for the audience; the software works with a set of parameters that allow for almost every part of a film to change.

Its manifestations include films, dynamic visualization, computer-driven installations, architectural designs, print catalogs, and DVDS.

[25] The book analyses in detail software applications such as Photoshop and After Effects, and how their interfaces and tools shape the visual aesthetics of contemporary media and design.

[27] The book uses a number of classical new media artworks as examples to illustrate how artists and designers create new metamedia.

The first half of the book develops a typology of images shared on Instagram, dividing them into ‘casual’,[31] ’professional’ and ‘designed’.

[32] In the latter half of the book, Manovich focuses on how Instagram allows its users to establish and develop their identities through their photos’ subjects, compositions, palettes, contrast levels, edits, filters, and presets.

During this period, the lab created a number of projects that used 17 million geo-located Instagram images from 18 cities.

In contrast to many works in digital humanities that focus on analysis of text, the book pays particular attention to visual media.

If traditional methods of analysis such as ‘close readings of small samples’[40] were adequate to study smaller communities of creators in previous centuries, they evidently do not allow for representative studies of digital culture, where millions of cultural artifacts are created and shared daily.

However, despite this limitation, Manovich remains optimistic about both the theoretical and practical potential of computational paradigms.