Anthropologist, Tufts University
Below, you can find a list of my publications with brief descriptions and links. If you’d like to read anything here and can’t access it, please feel free to email me and request a copy.
I co-organized the 2024 joint meeting of the Society for the Anthropology of Work and the Society for Economic Anthropology, on “Work and the Data Economy.” With Marcel LaFlamme and Alex Blanchette, I co-edited a special issue of Economic Anthropology collecting articles from the event. Our introductory essay traces the relationship between abstraction and contempt in datafication.
June 2025
A commentary for Social Analysis, co-authored with Bill Maurer, responding to a new translation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “The Mathematics of Man” (1956). We respond to his call for non-quantifying mathematical work through a history of the School of Social Sciences at UC Irvine, where researchers and administrators tried to establish a properly mathematical anthropology.
December 2024
For the Journal of Anthropological Research, I reviewed Ignacio Siles’ study of Costa Rican users of Spotify, Netflix, and TikTok, Living with Algorithms (MIT Press, 2022).
March 2024
This chapter in Scenes of Attention, edited by D. Graham Burnett and Justin E.H. Smith, compares two contemporary uses of attention: in popular critiques of the software industry, which try to defend human attention, and in AI architectures like GPT, which are built around novel “attention mechanisms.” The differences between these two uses of attention suggest that the concept is functioning as a cultural key symbol, rather than referring to an objective mental capacity.
November 2023
The people who make music recommender systems have lofty goals: they want to broaden listeners’ horizons and help obscure musicians find audiences, taking advantage of the enormous catalogs offered by companies like Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora. But for their critics, recommender systems seem to embody all the potential harms of algorithms: they flatten culture into numbers, they normalize ever-broadening data collection, and they profile their users for commercial ends. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork, this book describes how the makers of music recommendation navigate these tensions: how product managers understand their relationship with the users they want to help and to capture; how scientists conceive of listening itself as a kind of data processing; and how engineers imagine the geography of the world of music as a space they care for and control.
December 2022
This special issue of Science, Technology & Human Values, co-edited with Rebecca Jablonsky and Tero Karppi, gathers together articles that explore the slipperiness of attention’s meanings, shifting between payment and care, instinct and agency, or vulnerability and power.
March 2022
For the people who make recommender systems and would like them to work well on lots of music, the fact that care and scale seem intrinsically opposed is a problem. This article in Cultural Anthropology 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
This essay in the Annual Review of Anthropology, co-authored with Morten Axel Pedersen and Kristoffer Albris, reviews anthropological work on attention. Attention has rarely been an explicit focus for anthropologists, but it has played an important, tacit role in many of the discipline’s debates. We map out what an anthropology of attention could look like, encompassing both attentional technologies (like web sites or movie theaters) and techniques (like meditation or ritual).
August 2021
An essay in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute that compares 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.
April 2021
A special issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, co-edited with Rachel Douglas-Jones and Tone Walford, that puts new discourses about “data” into conversation with classic concerns of anthropological theory, like kinship, value, and personhood. Our introduction makes the case that anthropology’s contribution to understanding data should be theoretical, not only a matter of adding ethnographic thickness.
April 2021
How do the developers of music recommender systems think about the diversity of their teams, the differences between themselves and their users, and their technical consequences? This article, in a special issue of Cultural Studies edited by Blake Hallinan and James N. Gilmore, describes how developers were generally reluctant to recognize demographic categories as technically meaningful. Instead, they came to understand the difference between themselves and their users primarily in terms of music enthusiasm, or avidity.
March 2021
This article, in a special issue of the Journal of Material Culture edited by Alberto Corsín Jiménez and Chloe Nahum-Claudel, explores a tendency among the makers of recommender systems to describe their purpose as “hooking” people, enticing them into frequent or enduring usage. Anthropological theories about animal trapping prove useful for thinking about how these systems work.
December 2019
A chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture, written with Kaleb Goldschmitt, provides an overview of algorithmic recommenders in contemporary music streaming services, describing how they work, how they relate to other algorithmic applications, and problems that have emerged from their use.
August 2019
This book review offers an appraisal of Spotify Teardown (MIT Press, 2019), focused on methodological concerns.
May 2019
People who want to know things about algorithms, especially from the “outside,” face a variety of challenges. This chapter in the Digital STS Field Guide describes some of those challenges, arguing that they come from an overly narrow understanding of what an “algorithm” is, imagining them as simple recipes that only need to be revealed to be understood. Instead, the chapter argues that we should think about algorithms as heterogeneous and ever-changing “algorithmic systems,” composed of computational processes, data, people, and infrastructures.
May 2019
It has proven difficult to integrate interpretivist critiques of data science into technical practice. This article in Big Data & Society, co-authored with David Moats, describes our unsuccessful attempts to stage conversations between critical STS scholars and data science practitioners. This instructive failure revealed some tensions between the normative commitments of these fields.
March 2019
When encountering algorithmic systems, anthropologists often revert to a defense of the human, pitted against digital technologies. This short essay in Cultural Anthropology argues against embracing this “analog slot,” suggesting instead that we problematize the presumed opposition between humans and algorithms by attending to the humans involved in making algorithmic systems work.
August 2018
This blog post for Somatosphere 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
These unpublished comments, written for an event at the UC Irvine Center for Ethnography, reflect on messiness and mess halls, what happens inside of chrysalises, and the sometimes-boring history of computers in cultural anthropology.
May 2018
This article in Big Data & Society argues that, instead of thinking about algorithms as technical artifacts that intervene in culture from the outside, we should think about algorithms as culture, constituted by human practices. I provide a set of tactics for making algorithms ethnographically tractable, seeing them as heterogeneous and diffuse sociotechnical systems, rather than rigidly constrained and procedural formulas.
November 2017
The sci-fi movie Arrival illustrates a myth that is shared by anthropological fieldwork training and learn-to-code initiatives: that learning how to do something (like speaking a language or programming a computer) grants unmediated access to new fields of experience. This short essay, written for a Cultural Anthropology series on proficiency in fieldwork, argues that the conflation of proficiency and access is mystifying. Instead, we should think of the acquisition of proficiency not as fieldwork’s precondition, but its substance.
June 2017
This book review describes Antoine Hennion’s The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation, which presents the author’s work on the pragmatics of taste, locating it within a web of mediating supports. (He did not like it.)
February 2017
This weird little reflection explores connections between the mobile game Pokémon GO and the anthropological literature on trapping.
July 2016
Everyone seems to agree that context is important, but they don’t agree what to do about it. This essay in Media, Culture & Society reflects on a critique of big data, made by danah boyd and Kate Crawford, that the meaning of data can only be understood in context. Placing this idea alongside the emergence of “context-aware” recommender systems, I argue that we should recognize a variety of “context cultures” that value and operationalize context in different ways.
August 2015
This chapter in Data, Now Bigger and Better!, edited by Tom Boellstorff and Bill Maurer, discusses cultural anthropology’s long, troubled relationship with mathematical formalism, from Malinowski’s dismissal of kinship diagramming as a “bastard algebra” up through the present embrace of ethnographic thick description as a natural corrective or alternative to big data.
April 2015
The artist Kai Franz makes physical cellular automata, implementing digital programs using spoonfuls of paint or hammer strikes on metal. I wrote an essay for a book of his work, about the materiality of these pieces and the questions they raise about common understandings of algorithmic “life.”
September 2014
I wrote a series of blog posts for Savage Minds that surveys the history of computers as metaphors, tools, and objects of study in sociocultural anthropology.
May 2014
This essay responds to a feature in The Atlantic that sought to “reverse engineer” the weirdly precise micro-genre labels used by Netflix. While reverse engineering may be a useful strategy for figuring out how an existing technology works, it is less useful for telling us how it came to work that way. Along the way, I discuss structuralism, The Wizard of Oz, and a not-very-good Ben Affleck movie.
January 2014
This short essay describes the philosopher Otto Neurath’s notion of “auxiliary motives“: the inevitable extras that guide scientific and technological decisionmaking, beyond the pure application of rationality or pursuit of efficiency. By neglecting or demeaning these auxiliary motives, we risk the perils of pseudorationalism.
September 2013
Marshall Sahlins once suggested that marketers and anthropologists had a similar function: “to be sensitive to latent correspondences in the cultural order.” As algorithmic recommendation is pitched as a replacement for demographic marketing, this essay in Limn outlines the consequences of that parallel with anthropology.
May 2012
I co-edited an issue of the open-access scholarly magazine Limn with Chris Kelty and Lilly Irani, on new social media, data mining and surveillance, crowdsourcing, cloud computing, and big data. Together the pieces collected here raise questions about the relationship between technologies and the collectives that form in and through them.
May 2012
In the early twentieth century, the American Piano Company built a “re-enacting piano,” which could play back performances recorded by virtuoso pianists. This article in the journal differences examines how an ideal of recording fidelity was socially produced around this technology, along different lines than the more familiar fidelity of audio recording. Through a commingling of traits that had formerly been considered either human or mechanical, the re-enacting piano offered a way to imagine human and machine performances as materially interchangeable and potentially identical.
December 2011
My master’s thesis in Comparative Media Studies at MIT uses the history of the player piano to re-think and speculate about three central themes in the history of music reproduction: techniques for recording performance, the relationship between live and recorded music, and the development of fidelity.
June 2010
This is my undergraduate senior essay in literature at Yale, which explores the relationship between the concept of noise and techniques of sound reproduction, in a sort of rangy way. It’s a bit of juvenilia as a reward for making it to the bottom of the page.
April 2007