The boxicity of a graph G(V,E) is the minimum integer k such that G can be represented as the intersection graph of axis parallel boxes in Rk. Cubicity is a variant of boxicity, where the axis parallel boxes in the intersection representation are restricted to be of unit length sides. Deciding whether the boxicity (resp. cubicity) of a graph is at most k is NP-hard, even for k=2 or 3. Computing these parameters is inapproximable within O(n1−ϵ)-factor, for any ϵ>0 in polynomial time unless NP=ZPP, even for many simple graph classes. In this paper, we give a polynomial time κ(n) factor approximation algorithm for computing boxicity and a κ(n)⌈loglogn⌉ factor approximation algorithm for computing the cubicity, where κ(n)=2nloglogn∕logn. These o(n) factor approximation algorithms also produce the corresponding box (resp. cube) representations. As a special case, this resolves the question posed by Spinrad (2003) about polynomial time construction of o(n) dimensional box representations for boxicity 2 graphs. Other consequences of our approximation algorithm include O(κ(n)) factor approximation algorithms for computing the following parameters: the partial order dimension (poset dimension) of finite posets, the interval dimension of finite posets, minimum chain cover of bipartite graphs, Ferrers dimension of digraphs and threshold dimension of split graphs and co-bipartite graphs. Each of these parameters is inapproximable within an O(n1−ϵ)-factor, for any ϵ>0 in polynomial time unless NP=ZPP and the algorithms we derive seem to be the first o(n) factor approximation algorithms known for all these problems. We note that obtaining a o(n) factor approximation for poset dimension was also mentioned as an open problem by Felsner et al. (2017). In the second part of this paper, parameterized approximation algorithms for boxicity using various edit distance parameters are derived. We also present a parameterized approximation scheme for cubicity, using minimum vertex cover number as the parameter. © 2017 Elsevier B.V.