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.

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


Revised July 2022 in Somerville, MA