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.

Mess, Hospitality, and the Very Hungry Caterpillar. Comments delivered at the UC Irvine Center for Ethnography, May 1, 2018.
This commentary responds to two large-scale collaborative ethnographic projects hosted at the University of California Irvine: PECE, the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, and IMTFI, the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion. It reflects on messiness and mess halls, what happens inside of chrysalises, and the sometimes-boring history of computers in cultural anthropology.
May 2018


Revised July 2022 in Somerville, MA