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Author Seaver, Nick, 1985- author.

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

Publication Info. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022.
©2022

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 Avon Free Public Library - Adult Department  781.17 SEAVER    Check Shelf
 Newington, Lucy Robbins Welles Library - Adult Department  781.17 SEAVER    Check Shelf
Description xv, 203 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 23 cm
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 175-196) and index.
Contents Prologue. Open Plan -- Introduction. Technology with Humanity -- Too Much Music -- Captivating Algorithms -- What Are Listeners Like? -- Hearing and Counting -- Space Is the Place -- Parks and Recommendation -- Epilogue. What Are We Really Doing Here?
Summary "For the people who make them, music recommender systems hold a utopian promise: they can broaden listeners' horizons and help obscure musicians find audiences, taking advantage of the enormous catalogs offered by companies like Spotify, Apple Music, and their kin. But for critics, recommender systems have come to epitomize the potential harms of algorithms: they seem to reduce expressive culture to numbers, they normalize ever-broadening data collection, and they profile their users for commercial ends, tearing the social fabric into isolated patches of atomized individuals. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologist Nick Seaver offers an account of 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 engineers imagine the abstract geography of the "world of music" as a space they control and care for, how scientists conceive of listening itself as a kind of data processing. The book rehumanizes the algorithmic systems that shape our world, foregrounding the ideas animating the people who build and maintain them. Seaver braids together the thinking of programmers and anthropologists, opening up the cultural world of computation in a vividly theorized book that ranges widely from cosmology to calculation, metaphor to myth, and captivation to care"-- Provided by publisher.
Subject Music -- Philosophy and aesthetics.
Recommender systems (Information filtering)
Music -- Social aspects.
MUSIC / History & Criticism.
Music -- Philosophy and aesthetics. (OCoLC)fst01030408
Music -- Social aspects. (OCoLC)fst01030444
Recommender systems (Information filtering) (OCoLC)fst01743365
ISBN 9780226702261 (cloth)
022670226X (cloth)
9780226822976 (paperback)
0226822974 (paperback)
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