NICK SEAVER

I’m an anthropologist who studies how people use technology to make sense of cultural things.

I teach in the Department of Anthropology at Tufts University, where I also direct the program in Science, Technology, and Society.

My first book is about the people who make music recommender systems and how they think about their work. It’s called Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation, and you can order it from the University of Chicago Press or wherever else you like.

I’m currently studying the rise of attention as a value and virtue in machine learning worlds, from the new tech humanism to the infrastructure of neural networks.

Below, you can find links to my publications. If you’d like to read anything here and can’t access it, please feel free to email me for a copy.
I’m an anthropologist who studies how people use technology to make sense of cultural things.

I teach in the Department of Anthropology at Tufts University, where I also direct the program in Science, Technology, and Society.

My first book is about the people who make music recommender systems and how they think about their work. It’s called Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation, and you can pre-order it from the University of Chicago Press.

I’m currently studying the rise of attention as a value and virtue in machine learning worlds, from the new tech humanism to the infrastructure of neural networks.

Below, you can find links to my publications. If you’d like to read anything here and can’t access it, please feel free to email me for a copy.

Shifting Attention. Special issue of Science, Technology & Human Values 47 (2).

Co-edited with Rebecca Jablonsky and Tero Karppi.
This special issue gathers together a set of pieces concerned with shifts among attention’s many meanings: between payment and care, instinct and agency, or vulnerability and power. These articles examine how scientific and technical actors are invested in theorizing and capturing attention, while simultaneously engendering new forms of care, resistance, and critique.
March 2022

For the people who make recommender systems, the fact that care and scale seem intrinsically opposed is a problem. This article describes how they try to solve it. They do so not by giving up on care or abandoning their desire to scale, but by reimagining the terms of their relationship—redefining what care and scale mean in the process.
August 2021

The Political Economy of Attention. Annual Review of Anthropology 50: 309–325.

Written with Morten Axel Pedersen and Kristoffer Albris.
While attention has rarely been an explicit focus of anthropological inquiry, it has still played an important—if mostly tacit—part in many anthropological debates. In this essay, we review potential avenues for an incipient anthropology of attention, which studies how attentional technologies and techniques mold human minds and bodies.
August 2021

Everything Lies in a Space: Cultural Data and Spatial Reality. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27 (S1): 43–61.
This essay examines the use of spatializing techniques for analyzing cultural data in music recommendation and post-war cognitive anthropology. It explores three similarities between these fields: How spatial analyses engender a sense of continuous, enveloping milieu from discrete and often sparse data; how spatialization is used to grant culture a kind of reality rooted in pragmatic action and scientific quantification; and how spatial representations of culture are essentially anticipatory for the people who make them, transforming the near future into the nearby.
April 2021

Towards an Anthropology of Data. 2021 Special Issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Co-edited with Rachel Douglas-Jones and Tone Walford.
This special issue draws data’s apparent novelty into conversation with many classic anthropological concepts, from kinship to value to personhood. The work collected here attends to how discourses, practices, and imaginaries of data are reconfiguring familiar domains in unfamiliar ways.
April 2021


Revised July 2022 in Somerville, MA