This post grows out of an ethnographic study of media production at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Two graduate students (Ph.D. student Laura Meadows and M.A. student John Remensperger) and I explicitly set out to re-create the sort of field observations of the production of media events that Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang conducted […]
Announcement: new article by Lee Humphreys, “Connecting, Coordinating, Cataloguing: Communicative Practices on Mobile Social Networks”
Lee Humphreys has a new essay in the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, called “Connecting, Coordinating, Cataloguing: Communicative Practices on Mobile Social Networks.” This piece will be of great interest to the Culture Digitally crowd, especially those drawn to questions of the micropractices of digital life. Here’s the abstract: This article draws on Georg […]
The Ethnomathematics of Algorithms
Inspired by recent postings by Tarleton Gillespie and C.W. Anderson, I wanted to chime in with my own take on the material and political aspects of algorithms. I’ve been mulling this over in my work with sensor enthusiasts, both in the Quantified Self movement and in open data communities like Cosm (formerly Pachube). This is […]
The Relevance of Algorithms
I’m really excited to share my new essay, “The Relevance of Algorithms,” with those of you who are interested in such things. It’s been a treat to get to think through the issues surrounding algorithms and their place in public culture and knowledge, with some of the participants in Culture Digitally (here’s the full litany: Braun, Gillespie, Striphas, Thomas, […]
The Materiality of Algorithms
One of the most exciting aspects of the new research analyzing algorithmic culture is the manner by which portions of that research are increasingly routing around the slow, painful process of traditional academic knowledge production. This is not to say that the credentialing process afforded by peer-reviewed journals or university presses is irrelevant, but it […]