N Seaver
Biographic Data
| ID | 45101 |
|---|---|
| NAME | N Seaver |
| GIVEN NAMES | N |
| FAMILY NAME | Seaver |
| SIGNATURE | SEAVER N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tufts University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3913-1134 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 636 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Keep Computer Awake
This article examines mouse jigglers—devices that simulate user activity to prevent computers from sleeping—as a generative entry point into the study of media stimulation. Attending to their form and function, the article traces the semiotic and operatory chains within which these devices are inserted. Mouse jigglers intervene in technical systems that aim to render attention measurable and manageable, subverting the sensemaking activities of ot…
On recognizing the handiwork of AI
As AI‐generated images and texts proliferate, people have developed techniques for identifying them using clues like misshapen hands in images or distinctive words in text. This commentary situates these emerging practices within what Carlo Ginzburg called the “conjectural paradigm”: a mode of knowing that links contemporary AI detection to older traditions of medical symptomatology, art historical connoisseurship, and detective work. Yet unlike …
Work and the Data Economy
The 2024 joint meeting of the Society for Economic Anthropology and the Society for the Anthropology of Work took the theme of "Work and the Data Economy." The articles in this special issue, first presented at the meeting, explore the datafication of ethnographic settings not conventionally associated with high-tech or knowledge work. In this introduction, we argue that datafication is a key technology of abstraction that aggregates and transfor…
Forum
In a recent issue (Vol. 67, No. 2), we published a new translation, by Matthew Carey, of Claude Lévi-Strauss's seminal but often overlooked essay "The Mathematics of Man," which was originally published in French in 1956. As Susanne Küchler suggested in her introduction to the text, Lévi-Strauss's insistence on seeing mathematics as more than just a means of quantification and statistical analysis should be of enduring inspiration to anthropologi…
Living with Algorithms
Computing Taste
Introduction
In recent years, attention has become a matter of increasing public concern. New digital technologies have transformed human attention materially and discursively, reorganizing perceptual practices and inciting debates about them. The essays in this special issue emerged from a set of panels focused on attention at the 4S conference in New Orleans in 2019. They are all, in various ways, concerned with shifts among attention's many meanings: betwe…
Seeing like an infrastructure
As the influence of algorithmic systems has grown, critics have come to appreciate that algorithms are not autonomous technical forces, but rather heterogeneous sociotechnical systems. The people who build and maintain these infrastructures play integral roles in their functioning: in the tight and continuous cycles of contemporary software development, the thinking of developers shapes how data drives ‘data-driven’ organizations. This article co…
Care and Scale
The people who make algorithmic recommender systems want apparently incompatible things: they pride themselves on the scale at which their software works, but they also want to treat their materials and users with care. Care and scale are commonly understood as contradictory goals: to be careful is to work at small scale, while working at large scale requires abandoning the small concerns of care. Drawing together anthropological work on care and…
The Political Economy of Attention
Attention has become an issue of intense political, economic, and moral concern over recent years: from the commodification of attention by digital platforms to the alleged loss of the attentional capacities of screen-addicted children (and their parents). While attention has rarely been an explicit focus of anthropological inquiry, it has still played an important if mostly tacit part in many anthropological debates and subfields. Focusing on an…
Everything lies in a space
This essay examines the use of spatializing techniques for analysing cultural data, drawing on fieldwork with developers of music recommender systems in the United States. Comparing these practices with related analytic techniques developed by post-war cognitive anthropologists, it explores three broad topics: how such techniques engender a sense of continuous, enveloping milieu from discrete and often sparse data; how spatialization is used to g…
Introduction
The world is talking 'data'. The early cross-disciplinary, business-orientated hype around the potential of 'big' data, with its promises of unprecedented insight into social life, has given way. Data now motivates a sweep of dystopian visions, from rampant commodification to the invasion of privacy, political manipulation, and shadowy data doubles. Yet anthropologists have been cautious in taking data itself as their object, even as the social l…
Knowing Algorithms
You Social Scientists Love Mind Games
In recent years, many qualitative sociologists, anthropologists, and social theorists have critiqued the use of algorithms and other automated processes involved in data science on both epistemological and political grounds. Yet, it has proven difficult to bring these important insights into the practice of data science itself. We suggest that part of this problem has to do with under-examined or unacknowledged assumptions about the relationship …
Captivating algorithms
Algorithmic recommender systems are a ubiquitous feature of contemporary cultural life online, suggesting music, movies, and other materials to their users. This article, drawing on fieldwork with developers of recommender systems in the US, describes a tendency among these systems' makers to describe their purpose as 'hooking' people - enticing them into frequent or enduring usage. Inspired by steady references to capture in the field, the autho…
Every Sensation Is Only a Number
What Should an Anthropology of Algorithms Do
Algorithms as culture
This article responds to recent debates in critical algorithm studies about the significance of the term "algorithm." Where some have suggested that critical scholars should align their use of the term with its common definition in professional computer science, I argue that we should instead approach algorithms as "multiples"-unstable objects that are enacted through the varied practices that people use to engage with them, including the practic…
Attending to the mediators
The nice thing about context is that everyone has it
In their 'Critical Questions for Big Data', danah boyd and Kate Crawford warn: 'Taken out of context, Big Data loses its meaning'. In this short commentary, I contextualize this claim about context. The idea that context is crucial to meaning is shared across a wide range of disciplines, including the field of 'context-aware' recommender systems. These personalization systems attempt to take a user's context into account in order to make better, …
This Is Not a Copy
The American Piano Company, in the early twentieth century, built a reenacting piano that could automatically play back performances recorded by virtuoso pianists. This article examines the production, in the company lab, of that piano's fidelity-the terms by which an original and reenacted performance could be said to be the same. Taking fidelity not as an objective measure of sameness but rather as a mediation between machinery and people, the …
Algorithms as culture
This article responds to recent debates in critical algorithm studies about the significance of the term "algorithm." Where some have suggested that critical scholars should align their use of the term with its common definition in professional computer science, I argue that we should instead approach algorithms as "multiples"-unstable objects that are enacted through the varied practices that people use to engage with them, including the practic…
Captivating algorithms
Algorithmic recommender systems are a ubiquitous feature of contemporary cultural life online, suggesting music, movies, and other materials to their users. This article, drawing on fieldwork with developers of recommender systems in the US, describes a tendency among these systems' makers to describe their purpose as 'hooking' people - enticing them into frequent or enduring usage. Inspired by steady references to capture in the field, the autho…
What Should an Anthropology of Algorithms Do
Introduction
The world is talking 'data'. The early cross-disciplinary, business-orientated hype around the potential of 'big' data, with its promises of unprecedented insight into social life, has given way. Data now motivates a sweep of dystopian visions, from rampant commodification to the invasion of privacy, political manipulation, and shadowy data doubles. Yet anthropologists have been cautious in taking data itself as their object, even as the social l…
The nice thing about context is that everyone has it
In their 'Critical Questions for Big Data', danah boyd and Kate Crawford warn: 'Taken out of context, Big Data loses its meaning'. In this short commentary, I contextualize this claim about context. The idea that context is crucial to meaning is shared across a wide range of disciplines, including the field of 'context-aware' recommender systems. These personalization systems attempt to take a user's context into account in order to make better, …
The Political Economy of Attention
Attention has become an issue of intense political, economic, and moral concern over recent years: from the commodification of attention by digital platforms to the alleged loss of the attentional capacities of screen-addicted children (and their parents). While attention has rarely been an explicit focus of anthropological inquiry, it has still played an important if mostly tacit part in many anthropological debates and subfields. Focusing on an…
Care and Scale
The people who make algorithmic recommender systems want apparently incompatible things: they pride themselves on the scale at which their software works, but they also want to treat their materials and users with care. Care and scale are commonly understood as contradictory goals: to be careful is to work at small scale, while working at large scale requires abandoning the small concerns of care. Drawing together anthropological work on care and…
You Social Scientists Love Mind Games
In recent years, many qualitative sociologists, anthropologists, and social theorists have critiqued the use of algorithms and other automated processes involved in data science on both epistemological and political grounds. Yet, it has proven difficult to bring these important insights into the practice of data science itself. We suggest that part of this problem has to do with under-examined or unacknowledged assumptions about the relationship …
This Is Not a Copy
The American Piano Company, in the early twentieth century, built a reenacting piano that could automatically play back performances recorded by virtuoso pianists. This article examines the production, in the company lab, of that piano's fidelity-the terms by which an original and reenacted performance could be said to be the same. Taking fidelity not as an objective measure of sameness but rather as a mediation between machinery and people, the …
Everything lies in a space
This essay examines the use of spatializing techniques for analysing cultural data, drawing on fieldwork with developers of music recommender systems in the United States. Comparing these practices with related analytic techniques developed by post-war cognitive anthropologists, it explores three broad topics: how such techniques engender a sense of continuous, enveloping milieu from discrete and often sparse data; how spatialization is used to g…
Introduction
In recent years, attention has become a matter of increasing public concern. New digital technologies have transformed human attention materially and discursively, reorganizing perceptual practices and inciting debates about them. The essays in this special issue emerged from a set of panels focused on attention at the 4S conference in New Orleans in 2019. They are all, in various ways, concerned with shifts among attention's many meanings: betwe…
This Is Not a Copy
The American Piano Company, in the early twentieth century, built a reenacting piano that could automatically play back performances recorded by virtuoso pianists. This article examines the production, in the company lab, of that piano's fidelity-the terms by which an original and reenacted performance could be said to be the same. Taking fidelity not as an objective measure of sameness but rather as a mediation between machinery and people, the …
The nice thing about context is that everyone has it
In their 'Critical Questions for Big Data', danah boyd and Kate Crawford warn: 'Taken out of context, Big Data loses its meaning'. In this short commentary, I contextualize this claim about context. The idea that context is crucial to meaning is shared across a wide range of disciplines, including the field of 'context-aware' recommender systems. These personalization systems attempt to take a user's context into account in order to make better, …
Algorithms as culture
This article responds to recent debates in critical algorithm studies about the significance of the term "algorithm." Where some have suggested that critical scholars should align their use of the term with its common definition in professional computer science, I argue that we should instead approach algorithms as "multiples"-unstable objects that are enacted through the varied practices that people use to engage with them, including the practic…
Attending to the mediators
Every Sensation Is Only a Number
What Should an Anthropology of Algorithms Do
Knowing Algorithms
You Social Scientists Love Mind Games
In recent years, many qualitative sociologists, anthropologists, and social theorists have critiqued the use of algorithms and other automated processes involved in data science on both epistemological and political grounds. Yet, it has proven difficult to bring these important insights into the practice of data science itself. We suggest that part of this problem has to do with under-examined or unacknowledged assumptions about the relationship …
Captivating algorithms
Algorithmic recommender systems are a ubiquitous feature of contemporary cultural life online, suggesting music, movies, and other materials to their users. This article, drawing on fieldwork with developers of recommender systems in the US, describes a tendency among these systems' makers to describe their purpose as 'hooking' people - enticing them into frequent or enduring usage. Inspired by steady references to capture in the field, the autho…
Seeing like an infrastructure
As the influence of algorithmic systems has grown, critics have come to appreciate that algorithms are not autonomous technical forces, but rather heterogeneous sociotechnical systems. The people who build and maintain these infrastructures play integral roles in their functioning: in the tight and continuous cycles of contemporary software development, the thinking of developers shapes how data drives ‘data-driven’ organizations. This article co…
Care and Scale
The people who make algorithmic recommender systems want apparently incompatible things: they pride themselves on the scale at which their software works, but they also want to treat their materials and users with care. Care and scale are commonly understood as contradictory goals: to be careful is to work at small scale, while working at large scale requires abandoning the small concerns of care. Drawing together anthropological work on care and…
The Political Economy of Attention
Attention has become an issue of intense political, economic, and moral concern over recent years: from the commodification of attention by digital platforms to the alleged loss of the attentional capacities of screen-addicted children (and their parents). While attention has rarely been an explicit focus of anthropological inquiry, it has still played an important if mostly tacit part in many anthropological debates and subfields. Focusing on an…
Everything lies in a space
This essay examines the use of spatializing techniques for analysing cultural data, drawing on fieldwork with developers of music recommender systems in the United States. Comparing these practices with related analytic techniques developed by post-war cognitive anthropologists, it explores three broad topics: how such techniques engender a sense of continuous, enveloping milieu from discrete and often sparse data; how spatialization is used to g…
Introduction
The world is talking 'data'. The early cross-disciplinary, business-orientated hype around the potential of 'big' data, with its promises of unprecedented insight into social life, has given way. Data now motivates a sweep of dystopian visions, from rampant commodification to the invasion of privacy, political manipulation, and shadowy data doubles. Yet anthropologists have been cautious in taking data itself as their object, even as the social l…
Computing Taste
Introduction
In recent years, attention has become a matter of increasing public concern. New digital technologies have transformed human attention materially and discursively, reorganizing perceptual practices and inciting debates about them. The essays in this special issue emerged from a set of panels focused on attention at the 4S conference in New Orleans in 2019. They are all, in various ways, concerned with shifts among attention's many meanings: betwe…
Forum
In a recent issue (Vol. 67, No. 2), we published a new translation, by Matthew Carey, of Claude Lévi-Strauss's seminal but often overlooked essay "The Mathematics of Man," which was originally published in French in 1956. As Susanne Küchler suggested in her introduction to the text, Lévi-Strauss's insistence on seeing mathematics as more than just a means of quantification and statistical analysis should be of enduring inspiration to anthropologi…
Living with Algorithms
Work and the Data Economy
The 2024 joint meeting of the Society for Economic Anthropology and the Society for the Anthropology of Work took the theme of "Work and the Data Economy." The articles in this special issue, first presented at the meeting, explore the datafication of ethnographic settings not conventionally associated with high-tech or knowledge work. In this introduction, we argue that datafication is a key technology of abstraction that aggregates and transfor…
Keep Computer Awake
This article examines mouse jigglers—devices that simulate user activity to prevent computers from sleeping—as a generative entry point into the study of media stimulation. Attending to their form and function, the article traces the semiotic and operatory chains within which these devices are inserted. Mouse jigglers intervene in technical systems that aim to render attention measurable and manageable, subverting the sensemaking activities of ot…
On recognizing the handiwork of AI
As AI‐generated images and texts proliferate, people have developed techniques for identifying them using clues like misshapen hands in images or distinctive words in text. This commentary situates these emerging practices within what Carlo Ginzburg called the “conjectural paradigm”: a mode of knowing that links contemporary AI detection to older traditions of medical symptomatology, art historical connoisseurship, and detective work. Yet unlike …
Sociology (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Political science (6 works) · Innovative Human-Technology Interaction (5 works) · Psychology (5 works) · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Sociotechnical system (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works)