Computing taste : algorithms and the makers of music recommendation / Nick Seaver.

Author/creator Seaver, Nick, 1985- author.
Format Electronic
PublicationChicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, [2022]
Description1 online resource (xv, 203 pages) : illustrations (black and white)
Supplemental ContentEBSCOhost
Subjects

Contents Prologue: Open Plan -- Introduction: Technology with Humanity -- Chapter 1 Too Much Music -- Chapter 2 Captivating Algorithms -- Chapter 3 What Are Listeners Like? -- Chapter 4 Hearing and Counting -- Chapter 5 Space Is the Place -- Chapter 6 Parks and Recommendation -- Epilogue: What Are We Really Doing Here? -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index
Abstract "Meet the people who design the algorithms that capture our musical tastes. The 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, anthropologist Nick Seaver 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. Computing Taste rehumanizes the algorithmic systems that shape our world, drawing attention to the people who build and maintain them. In this vividly theorized book, Seaver brings the thinking of programmers into conversation with the discipline of anthropology, opening up the cultural world of computation in a wide-ranging exploration that travels from cosmology to calculation, myth to machine learning, and captivation to care."-- Provided by publisher.
Bibliography noteIncludes bibliographical references and index.
Source of descriptionDescription based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on December 19, 2022).
Issued in other formPrint version: Seaver, Nick, 1985- Computing taste. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022 9780226702261
ISBN9780226822969 (electronic bk.)
ISBN0226822966 (electronic bk.)
ISBN(hardcover)
ISBN(paperback)
Stock number9780226822969 BiblioVault
Stock number06866C94-F3B5-4A19-84B9-5BCAAF55D934 OverDrive, Inc. http://www.overdrive.com

Availability

Library Location Call Number Status Item Actions
Electronic Resources Access Content Online ✔ Available