Everything Lies in a Space: Cultural Data and Spatial RealityThis essay in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 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.