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. You can also filter this list to see only publications about algorithms, anthropology or attention.
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Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music RecommendationThe 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
Attention Is All You Need: Humans and Computers in the Time of Neural NetworksThis 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
Shifting AttentionThis special issue of Science, Technology & Human Values, co-edited with Rebecca Jablonsky and Tero Karppi, gathers a set of articles that explore shifts among attention’s many meanings: between payment and care, instinct and agency, or vulnerability and power. Scientific and technical actors who are invested in theorizing and capturing attention nevertheless engender new forms of care, resistance, and critique.
March 2022
Care and Scale: Decorrelative Ethics in Algorithmic RecommendationFor the people who make recommender systems, 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
The Political Economy of AttentionThis essay in the Annual Review of Anthropology, co-authored with Morten Axel Pedersen and Kristoffer Albris, reviews anthropological work on attention. While attention per se has rarely been an explicit focus for anthropologists until recently, it has played an important, tacit role in many anthropological debates. We review potential avenues for an incipient anthropology of attention, which studies how attentional technologies (like web sites or movie theaters) and techniques (like meditation or ritual) mold human minds and bodies.
August 2021
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.
April 2021
Towards an Anthropology of DataThis special issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, co-edited with Rachel Douglas-Jones and Tone Walford, draws the apparent novelty of “data” into conversation with classic anthropological concerns, from kinship to value to personhood. The work collected here envisions a relationship between anthropology and data that is conceptual and theoretical, not only concerned with providing supplementary ethnographic thickness. Our introductory essay explores these themes in more detail.
April 2021
Seeing Like an Infrastructure: Avidity and Difference in Algorithmic RecommendationHow 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, descibes 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
Captivating Algorithms: Recommender Systems as TrapsThis 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 embody models of their users and sit within broader infrastructural ecologies of knowledge and technology.