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 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.
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.
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Shifting Attention. Special issue of Science, Technology & Human Values 47 (2).
Co-edited with Rebecca Jablonsky and Tero Karppi.
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
The Political Economy of Attention. Annual Review of Anthropology 50: 309–325.
Written with Morten Axel Pedersen and Kristoffer Albris.
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
How to Pay Attention. Somatosphere. July 30, 2018.
This blog post describes the motivation behind and the design of my Tufts seminar “How to Pay Attention,” an advanced undergraduate course that tries to imagine what an anthropology of attention might look like.
July 2018