Style is a fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of the human experience: Everyone instantly and constantly assesses people and things according to their individual styles, academics establish careers by researching musical, artistic, or architectural styles, and entire industries maintain themselves by continuously creating and marketing new styles. Yet what exactly style is and how it works are elusive: We certainly know it when we see it, but there is no shared and clear understanding of the diverse phenomena that we call style.

The Structure of Style explores this issue from a...

The ability to communicate cultural codes in multimedia depends on their meaning and beauty, as perceived by different audiences around the globe. In this book, the ongoing research on computational modeling of visual, musical and textual contents is described in terms of identifying and mapping their semantic representations across different cultures. The underlying psychology of sense-making is quantified through analysis of aesthetics in terms of organizational and structural aspects of the contents that influence an audience's formation of expectations for future signals, violations of...