Nick Seaver is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, where he also directs the program in Science, Technology & Society.
He is co-editor of Towards an Anthropology of Data (2021) and the author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation (2022), an ethnographic study of how music recommender system developers think about music, listeners, and listening. Seaver’s work brings anthropological methods and theory to bear on objects like taste, attention, and complexity, arguing that they are at once cultural and technical. He is a fellow with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s Future Flourishing Program. Currently, he is writing Attention Fragments, a fragmentary ethnography on the meaning and measurement of attention, under contract with the University of Chicago Press, and developing a new project on the anthropology of contraptions.