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.

The Nice Thing about Context Is That Everyone Has It. Media, Culture & Society 37 (7): 1101–1109.
Written as part of a special section reflecting on danah boyd and Kate Crawford’s “Critical Questions for Big Data,” this essay takes on the idea that the meaning of data is crucially dependent on context. What does this mean? By placing this common critique alongside the emergence of contextual recommender systems, the piece argues that we should recognize a variety of “context cultures”: approaches to data that agree on context’s importance, but disagree on what to do about it.
August 2015


Revised July 2022 in Somerville, MA