Cultural Analytics refers to the use of mathematical, computational, and data visualization methods for the study of cultures. While these methods can be applied to the analysis of historical cultural artifacts and records, they are particularly appropriate for contemporary global digital culture because of its massive scale. Digital cultural expressions are born as digital fles (.txt, .pdf, HTML, JavaScript, .css, .jpg, .mov, .aiff, etc.). The traces of online behavior are also recorded in digital form. This allows researchers to start analyzing these expressions and traces right away using algorithms, bypassing the stage of digitization required for non-digital artifacts. During March-June 2016, the Culture Analytics Program at UCLA brought together 115 speakers, 40 long term (3 months) researchersin-residence and dozens of visitors. Drawing on the work that already had been going on for more than ten years, the program articulated new goals for the computational study of culture. The following text is Lev Manovich's contribution to these discussions of Culture Analytics. He is using his original (2005) term “cultural analytics” rather than “culture analytics” to emphasize that the presented views and opinions are his, and he is not trying to represent a group consensus. The interview with the author, which follows the article, helps to clarify some details of the author's theoretical views as well as the history of Cultural Analytics notion.

Transmedia storytelling (TS) refers to media experiences expanded across multiple platforms. This article discusses the specifcity of Russian TS initiatives. The goal of the research is to determine the social and cultural contexts in which TS is adopted in Russia by reconstructing the panorama of the Russian transmedia landscape. The qualitative research is methodologically supported by an analysis of documents and materials regarding transmedia projects in Russia and presents an interdisciplinary theoretical approach (1) to explore the concept of TS and the variability of terminology in different contexts; (2) to situate the discussion of TS in the contemporary Russian media space and above all (3) to analyze examples of transmedia projects in Russia. Since TS is just emerging in Russian media and media studies, the article represents an attempt to map the Russian transmedia landscape.

The article analyses CTC Media digital projects, and puts forward a theoretically coherent explanation for the term “transmedia”. I attempt to answer the question whether or not the transmedia label could be applied to CTC Media projects, primarily through analysis of the Molodyozhka project using the principles of transmedia storytelling. As my analysis shows, the Molodyozhka project team managed to incorporate the majority of transmedia storytelling principles, as described by Henry Jenkins. Therefore, Molodyozhka can be described as a transmedia project. However, a number of avenues still need to be explored. First and foremost, there should be more unique content created for various extensions of the project. Second, UGC (content created by fans and followers) should be utilised to a greater extent: producers should engineer a way for the fans to gain the ability to infuence the way the story develops so as to harness the creative abilities of Molodyozhka's fanbase. Among various projects in Russia, Molodyozhka uses transmedia principles better than any other, and it has become a benchmark for CTC Media as a whole.

New technologies and new forms of media have changed the mechanisms for selecting information triggers and their presentation in news reports. Thanks to convergence of various types of media channels, posts from social media networks have begun to serve as information triggers. The distribution of such triggers wholly replicates the distribution of information triggers formed under the infuence of more usual mechanisms, although a political agenda is emphasized a bit more than other topics. Among all the social media, Twitter and Facebook are the most frequently cited. In this article, we analyze the meme “glutton cat”/“pilferer cat” and trace the interaction between traditional mass media and social networks. In general, this interaction can be expressed as two simultaneous processes: a certain event draws the attention of social network users after it is discussed in traditional media, and the popularity of this event in social networks becomes a further news trigger for traditional media. The two types of media channels generate information triggers for each other. The meme we analyze, which functions in both spaces, demonstrates that traditional media play a more signifcant role in shaping memes, and that there exists a closer connection between various types of media, their inconsistency notwithstanding.

This paper attempts to analyze how the historical content of some videogames is appreciated in relation to game designers' and gamers' views of “historical authenticity” as well as medium restrictions. The steady increase in the number of historical setting games provokes a natural interest among researchers who analyze re-enactment of conceptions of the past in the new media. The project under study, Europa Universalis IV, which encompasses a variety of historical events, demonstrates multiple diverse strategies aimed at constructing the effect of «historical authenticity» in videogames. Analysis of audience reception of this videogame allows us to state that the gamers engage in quite intensive refection regarding the historical content of the videogame. Not only popular beliefs about the past incorporated in a game's mechanics have a research value but also the gamers' modes of interacting with it. Game designers' technical decisions (i. e., the game rules) are interpreted both at play level and at the level of historical narratives constructed by using them.

For as long as data have been generated about cities various kinds of data-informed urbanism have been occurring. In this paper, I argue that a new era is presently unfolding wherein data-informed urbanism is increasingly being complemented and replaced by data-driven, networked urbanism. Cities are becoming ever more instrumented and networked, their systems interlinked and integrated, and vast troves of big urban data are being generated and used to manage and control urban life in real-time. Data-driven, networked urbanism, I contend, is the key mode of production for what have widely been termed smart cities. In this paper I provide a critical overview of data-driven, networked urbanism and smart cities focusing in particular on the relationship between data and the city (rather than network infrastructure or computational or urban issues), and critically examine a number of urban data issues including: the politics of urban data; data ownership, data control, data coverage and access; data security and data integrity; data protection and privacy, dataveillance, and data uses such as social sorting and anticipatory governance; and technical data issues such as data quality, veracity of data models and data analytics, and data integration and interoperability. I conclude that whilst data-driven, networked urbanism purports to produce a commonsensical, pragmatic, neutral, apolitical, evidence-based form of responsive urban governance, it is nonetheless selective, crafted, fawed, normative and politically-infected. Consequently, whilst data-driven, networked urbanism provides a set of solutions for urban problems, it does so within limitations and in the service of particular interests.

Methodological frameworks and diverse research interests of scholars can defne a wide range of the optics that let us describe the effects of digitalization. All those things — the analysis of the correlation between everyday digitization and conventional and innovational ways of teaching the rules of responsible urban activities — contract the examination horizon. In this paper I do not attempt to produce a universal explanation of the multiple — and frequently antagonistic — aspects of involving urbanites in (re) production of the urban modes of life. I restrict myself to particular, precedent-setting cases that allow me to diagnose what interests me: the status quo of Russian urbanistic educational management.

This paper deals with how mobile devices function in the context of social order construction in public transport. Using ethnographic material that was collected in share-taxis (marshrutkas) in the city of Volgograd I show that gadgets are used in two user modes to create so-called moral worlds that defne the plurality and contextuality of social assemblages. Social order is not predetermined, it is created and maintained “on the move”. Passengers use gadgets to build “walls” and “windows” for direct communication with familiar and unfamiliar people in the cabin of the vehicle. Mobile devices are neutral in the moral sense, beyond “Good” and “Evil”, because inside of them there is nothing that connects or disconnects individuals and groups.

The article presents an investigation into the interrelationship between parents and their mobile practices in the urban environment. Our focus was on young mothers who use mobile devices when communicating with their children in different city locations: playgrounds, museums, public transportion etc. The study involved three methodological approaches: a questionnaire, interviews, and observation of playgrounds. The main question posed in our research was to determine the factors, norms and practices that shape usage of mobile devices in different urban environments. We determined that attitude to the devices changes depending on the various urban spaces where they are used. Playgrounds and public transportion are viewed as a zone for peer pressure where the norms depend on the situational frame. Such localities as museums and theaters provide a rich content that successfully competes with the digital one. Parents also regard technology as redundant in intimate and spiritual contexts. It is also true that different mobile practices depend on the type of embodiment, e.g. calling has special disadvantages because of bothering other people, but it allows one to see what is going on with the children, while using social network sites or messengers is more eye-catching. Finally, the most important positive aspect of using mobile devices is maintaining close ties between family members and/or within an extended family.

This article is an extended preamble to the thematic section of the journal devoted to contemporary debates among post-Marxist theorists regarding the transformation of capitalism in the digital age. In tracing the continuity between classical Marxist ideas and contemporary approaches to the analysis of the interdependence of political regimes, economic processes and new technologies, the author pays special attention to the contextual clarifcation of those issues that are discussed in detail in the articles featured into this section.These include: What does the idea about the “liberation of labor” mean in the post-Fordist economy (or, “what's wrong” with the program of full automation of labor within the scenario of the Fourth Industrial Revolution)? How and why has the notion of “multitude” become a useful category of social analysis in post-Marxist theory? Last but not least, under the conditions of the capitalist status quo, can new technologies provide new opportunities not only for those who turn knowledge into yet another kind of commodity, but also for those who, either in theory or in practice, link the prospect of the liberation of knowledge with the “communist hypothesis”.

This article presents an analysis of technological automatization in the context of the evolution of industrial and informational capitalism. The relevance of this topic is determined by the revival of discourse about automatization which is linked to the fourth manufacturing revolution and which has raised many questions from left-wing critics. This confict has a lengthy history as, despite the fact that left criticism and capital clearly disagreed on issues concerning private property, they were in complete agreement that labor should be fully automatized. In many respects, during the industrial age capitalism failed in its task to automate all types of labor. Automation of manufacturing led not to the disappearance of labor but to its transformation, which gave birth to a postindustrial economy, and at this point, the evolution of capitalism stopped for quite a long time. Informationalism — a new development paradigm based on innovations in the area of software — helped lead capitalism out of its historical blind alley. In turn, the growth of informational capitalism soon led to local automation being replaced by centralized automation using cloudbased technologies that signifcantly broadened the possibilities for automation of immaterial labor and led to a radical increase of control over everyday life. Thus was made possible that last stage of automation which both capital and left-wing critics had anticipated from the beginning — the complete automation of material and immaterial labor.

One of the most popular concepts in contemporary political philosophy is that of “multitude”, which means the joint exercise of power by a great number of individuals, connected among themselves only by their singularities. This article is made up of two parts. In the frst, I present a genealogical interpretation of the concept of “multitude” in contemporary political philosophy, which treats “multitude” as a type of embodiment of power in a “society of control” coming after a “disciplinary society”. The contemporary internet-movement of “Anonymous” most sharply embodies this type of functioning of power dispersed between singular individuals. A juxtaposition of “Anonymous” as a movement functioning in digital space and “multitude” as a political concept is treated in the second part of this article.

In this paper we discuss “digitality” not as an epiphenomenon of the modern technological world but as a special way of philosophical thinking. We address digitality as a special intellectual process characterized by two main features: 1) transcendence of material immanent reality and 2) division of “One into Two” or division of One into discreet indivisibilia. We consider two examples of such thinking: the cosmological theory of the physicist Max Tegmark and the ontological theory of the prominent French philosopher Alain Badiou. Our fundamental premise is that “digitalization” creates a special position for the Subject and alienates it. Moreover, it makes it necessary for the Subject to become a point in the hierarchy of power. At the end, we pose the question whether a different, “analog” mode of understanding the world is possible.

Lapina-Kratasyuk, E. G., Moroz, O. V., Nim, E. G. (Eds.) (2016). Nastroika iazyka: upravlenie kommunikatsiiami na postsovetskom prostranstve: Kollektivnaia monografia [Adjusting language: Managing communications in post-Soviet space. A collective monograph]. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 448 p. (In Russian).