I just graduated from my 4 week Ancient Philosophy course with the University of Pennsylvania (
@Penn
). I know... my hobbies are very impractical, but it took a lot of hours after the kids were asleep. Thank you Plato and predecessors for all the "fun" over the past month!
When I started my DISSERTATION on helping ROBOTS to DIGEST and ENJOY the INTESTINES of HUMAN CHILDREN, I never thought my research would be co-opted by VILLAINS!
some people say that you shouldn't read academic talks, but when I went off-script today I ended up describing early modern information overload as "being horny for the library"
Are there people out there who actually understand the organizational scheme of Google Docs? It can't be the case that everyone randomly clicks around until they spot the shared thing they're looking for, right?
Hey folks, here's a post-print of my article "Captivating Algorithms: Recommender Systems as Traps," due out next year in the Journal of Material Culture:
You can do science without "STEM"! People have done it that way for a long time!
The only reason to fund "STEM" instead of "education" is because you don't want to fund the humanities, thank you for coming to my TED talk
Hey everyone, I've got a new article out: "Algorithms as Culture: Some Tactics for the Ethnography of Algorithmic Systems"
(It's a theory/tricks of the trade piece, which I hope will be especially useful for grad students starting research projects.)
my favorite thing about mathematicians is how they have explanations of their research that launch you from grade-school math into space, like "you know how lines sometimes cross? and three lines might cross at the same point? I study how that happens in infinity dimensions"
It finally exists! This chapter began its life as a term paper for Geof Bowker's Social Analysis of Computing course in... 2012. You may know it as "that paper that gets cited as a conference presentation and has mostly been a PDF on Nick's website."
you know that if we had twitter and a pandemic in 1984, Bruno Latour would have been on here with an 80-tweet thread about how viruses didn't really exist until we "discovered" them
Finally sharing the syllabus for this year's iteration of my anthro seminar, "How to Pay Attention":
This is one of my favorite things I've gotten to do since becoming a professor, and I'm lucky to have the students and institution to be able to do it!
This is horrifying. Companies trying to divest themselves of responsibility for training their employees and then pretending it's universities that aren't doing their job???
Academia's inability to keep up with the demands and norms of a 21st century workplace has employers in and out of tech saying 'screw it, we'll teach 'em ourselves.'
oooh, 🔥🔥🔥: "Infrastructures of abstraction: how computer science education produces anti-political subjects" (Argues that while CS practices of abstraction look like potential bridges across disciplines, in practice, they block critical projects.)
hey, it's my official pub date! and the other bad website is doing its thing, letting me know that I'm
#1
in "music appreciation," which is definitely what the book is about
lol the guy emailing the whole membership of the American Anthropological Association to warn us that BLM is “an avowed Marxist organization” may have a bad understanding of the political leanings of the average anthropologist
Extremely noticeable drop-off in student morale this week, as the weather gets colder, midterms get started, and the election looms. Check on your students, folks.
it's here! the syllabus for my new class, "Technologies of Enchantment," featuring fishing weirs, slot machines, fake houses for mosquitos, multi-level marketing, and phishing scams:
REVISIONS, IN COFFEE SHOP
ME: alright, that's enough Twitter, let's open this file
BODY: Are we a little hungry?
ME: No
BODY: Thirsty?
ME: *gets water* alright time to wri–
BODY: I have to pee
ONE HOUR LATER
ME: alright, that's enough Twitter let's–
BODY: I have to pee again
Terrible timing, but if you're having a very exciting Friday night and have institutional access, my new article is online!: Everything Lies in a Space: Cultural Data and Spatial Reality
If you thought professors had basically no training in how to teach and just emulate their own educations, wait until you see them try to design online courses from scratch
One of the best things I've implemented in my classes (yanked from somewhere I don't remember) is to have students submit a ~250 word cover letter with their final papers, written informally, about their experience writing, what they learned, and what they most want comments on.
oh man, getting vax shot
#1
in a hotel ballroom is the most contact with other people I've had in over a year, and I have evidently become a feral animal
Asking for a student: anyone have favorite references on the history of efficiency as a value? (In the “west”, in tech, whatever you got!) I feel like there’s some obvious canonical thing I’m forgetting.
I don't want to think about how many likes ago that steamed hams tweet passed the total number of people who will ever read anything I write in an academic venue
🚨 new publication alert 🚨
I co-authored this annual review essay on the anthropology of attention with Morten Axel Pedersen and
@Krisalbris
, in which we try to draw out the disciplines’s longstanding, mostly tacit interest in attention:
This term I finally got to assign this paper I've fantasized about for years to a whole class of anthro theory students, where they pick a figure and trace it through the semester's readings. Very fun to read (and "blood" was the most popular by a long shot).
I really have no use for a grammar checker, EXCEPT that I would love it if my word processor called out repeated words, like "you know you used that adverb in the last sentence too" or "that five-dollar noun also appears a couple paragraphs up, shakespeare"
always taken aback by how insistent technologists are in framing any ethical debate in terms of a near future where all of their designs are powerful and successful
This will be of interest to some of you (particularly those who tend to the "tech should hire social scientists" critique, as this describes how Spotify uses grounded theory to create personas that they describe as boundary objects):
*New Blog Post* We've just released a new post detailing how we developed our personas tool, how we use it today and why it’s so useful for an autonomous, cross-functional organisation like Spotify. Enjoy 🥳🙌
whenever I dip into cultural sociology, I am repeatedly astonished by the omnipresence of Bourdieu—he's unfathomably central, like it's hard to imagine that any other contemporary discipline has a figure that looms as large as he does
because we're more or less giving up on Halloween costumes this year, here's one of our best from the archives: corn geneticist Barbara McClintock and two generations of corn