Speakers

Julien Boyadjian 

Le rapport des étudiants à la culture à l’ère numérique : éclectisme indistinct ou éclairé ?

Is the relationship between young French students and culture characterized by a form of indistinct eclecticism? The most recent studies dedicated to French cultural tastes and practices (Lombardo and Wolff, 2020) point to a clear trend towards "omnivorism" in this social category, reinforced all the more by the digitization of cultural practices. The students of the 2020s would thus be very different from those of the "heirs" (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964) and their "cultural snobbery". Based on this observation, can we conclude that the theory of cultural legitimacy is no longer effective in understanding students' relationship to culture in the digital age? To answer this question, this communication draws on the results of a survey involving questionnaires, interviews and online observations conducted with a range of socially diverse student audiences. Over and above an obvious form of cultural eclecticism, the survey also uncovers significant sociological differences between audiences, and invites us to dissociate the "enlightened" eclecticism of students in elitist streams from the "indistinct" eclecticism of working-class student audiences.

Biography

 Julien Boyadjian is assistant professor in political science at Sciences Po Lille and researcher at CERAPS. His work focuses on the sociology of the digital age, online political participation, new survey methods in the digital age and the sociology of cultural practices. He is the author of Jeunesses connectées, les digital natives au prisme des inégalités socio-culturelles published by the Presses universitaires du Septentrion (2022).

 He is also the author of Analyser les opinions politiques political opinions on the Internet, published by Dalloz (2016), a book based on his thesis manuscript.

Nathalie Casemajor

Cultures of data: a transatlantic look at public data

Over the past dozen years, "data culture" has imposed itself as a new way of thinking about cultural audiences and their practices. It refers to a set of dispositions enabling people to orientate themselves and work in a world increasingly mediated by digital data. The "data culture" paradigm has inspired several institutional arrangements in the arts and culture field. These aim to collect, aggregate, analyze and share data sets that provide information on the socio-demographic profiles of audiences and their cultural behaviors. In the UK, the Audience Finder database is supplied by publicly-funded arts and cultural organizations. In France, the Pass Culture is another type of scheme fed directly by the consumption choices of audiences. In Quebec, Culture pour tous explores the legal model of the data trust as a mutualization tool in the cultural sector. What these schemes have in common is that they respond to the growing phenomenon of the "datafication" of audiences. What are the normative effects, value regimes and prescriptions associated with "data culture"? The aim of this presentation is to take a transatlantic look (from Quebec) at this category of thought and its practical repercussions on professional practices in the cultural field.

Biography

Nathalie Casemajor is a professor-researcher at the Urbanisation Culture Société Research Centre of the INRS (Institut national de la recherche scientifique, Montreal). Her work focuses on cultural development, citizen mobilization and digital culture.

She is the scientific director of the Observatoire des médiations culturelles (OMEC) and co-edited the book Expériences critiques de la médiation culturelle (PUL, 2017). She has also conducted research projects on cultural institutions and Wikipedia, on digital cultural participation and on the circulation of artworks on the web.

Selected publications

Casemajor, N., Bellavance G. et Sirois G. (2021). « Cultural participation in digital environments: goals and stakes for Quebec cultural policies. » International Journal of Cultural Policy 27 (5): 650-666.

Casemajor, N., Sirois, G., Mathieu, L-C.; Morin, A.; Melançon, L. (2021). La gouvernance des données d’usage : enjeux éthiques et perceptions des publics dans les bibliothèques et archives. Synthèse de la littérature. Institut national de la recherche scientifique, Montréal.

Casemajor N., Bellavance G., Sirois G. avec la collaboration de El Ouardi M., Jamet R., Jeldi M. et Perron A. (2018), Pratiques culturelles numériques et plateformes participatives. Opportunités, défis et enjeux, FRQSC Action concertée sur la culture et le numérique – Synthèse des connaissances, Montréal, INRS. 188 p.

Maria Eriksson

Corporate secrecy, legal gray zones, and risk-taking in the study of culture in digital contexts

 The study of culture has always been politically charged and shaped by problems regarding access to key stakeholders, information, and physical spaces. Unsurprisingly, this is also the case with studies of culture in digital contexts, where most cultural exchanges take place on commercial digital platforms that are meticulously governed and controlled. These platforms significantly impact culture through their ways of sorting/ranking cultural content, handling user data, and delegating decision-making processes to automated systems. Yet the  willingness for tech corporations to collaborate with researchers in the humanities and social sciences remains, at best, uncertain. How should the public interest in gaining insights about the workings of online platforms be balanced with the need to respect corporate interests? What methods and tools are available for scholars that study the logic and practices of online platforms? Drawing a five-year-long research project that explored the politics of streaming platforms in general – and Spotify as a music aggregation service in particular – this talk reflects on methodological problems and possibilities in the study of culture online. In particular, it will discuss legal uncertainties surrounding research on and about digital platforms and how such uncertainties may impact the freedom of academic research.

Biography

Maria Eriksson is a Postdoc and Research Associate at the Seminar for Media Studies at Basel University in Switzerland. Her research is located at the intersection of software studies, social anthropology, and science and technology studies and focuses on the interplay between culture and technology. She is one of the co-authors of the book Spotify Teardown (2019, MIT Press) and has previously published research on disruptive software updates, the cultural dimensions of music recommendation systems, and the logistical politics of music playlists. Since 2020, she has been involved in several research projects that investigate how AI and machine learning models can – and cannot – make sense of digitised sound, photography, and moving image archives.

Selected publications

Eriksson M. et.al. 2019. Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music. MIT Press.  

Eriksson M. 2020. The Editorial Playlist as Container Technology: Notes on the Logistical Role of Digital Music Packages. Journal of Cultural Economy 13(4).  

Eriksson M. & Johansson, A. 2018. “Keep Smiling!": Time, Functionality and Intimacy in Spotify’s Featured Playlists. Cultural Analysis 16.  

Morreale F. & Eriksson M. 2020. “My Library Has Just Been Obliterated”: Producing New Norms of Use Via Software Updates. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.   

Nick Seaver

Computing Taste: Care and Control in Algorithmic Music Recommendation

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 of music streaming services. 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. This talk presents the results of several years of ethnographic fieldwork with makers of music recommendation in the US, describing how they navigate the tensions between care and control in the construction of algorithmic systems.

Biography

Nick Seaver is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology  and director of the program in Science, Technology, and Society at Tufts  University. His research examines the cultural theorizing of technical  experts, with a focus on machine learning researchers and practitioners.  He has published on topics such as commercial theories of context, the  anthropology of trapping, and ethnographic methodologies for studying  algorithmic systems.

 Recently, he has turned to studying the  technocultural life of “attention” in and around machine learning  systems. He is the author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation (2022), an ethnographic study of recommender system developers, and co-editor of Towards an Anthropology of Data (2021).  Previously, he was co-chair of the American Anthropological  Association’s Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and  Computing. He holds a BA in Literature from Yale University, an SM in  Comparative Media Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of  Technology, and an MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of  California, Irvine.

Selected publications

2023 Attention Is All You Need. In Scenes of Attention, ed. D. Graham Burnett and Justin E.H. Smith. Columbia University Press. 

2021 The Political Economy of Attention. With Morten Axel Pedersen and Kristoffer Albris. Annual Review of Anthropology 50: 309–325.

2021 Care and Scale: Decorrelative Ethics in Algorithmic Recommendation. Cultural Anthropology 36 (3): 509–537.

2021 Seeing Like an Infrastructure: Avidity and Difference in Algorithmic Recommendation. Cultural Studies 35 (4–5): 771–791.

2021 Everything Lies in a Space: Cultural Data and Spatial Reality. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27 (S1): 43–61.

2019 Shaping the Stream: The Techniques and Troubles of Algorithmic Recommendation. With K.E. Goldschmitt. In Cambridge Companion to Music and Digital Culture, ed. Nicholas Cook, Monique Ingalls, David Trippett, and Peter Webb. Cambridge University Press, 63–81.

Marta Severo

Cultural institutions, amateurs and platforms: configurations and boundaries

 In recent years, the development of digital technologies has given new impetus to the figure of the amateur, particularly in the field of culture. Various associative, institutional and commercial players have opened up contributory platforms to enable amateurs, or more generally citizens, to participate in the construction of knowledge. Scientific research on this subject tends to identify and describe two opposing phenomena: on the one hand, amateur platforms rooted in participatory culture, and on the other, institutional platforms, often embodied in the form of crowdsourcing tools. Through the analysis of several case studies, this presentation will show the value of going beyond this opposition and studying the circulation of actors and ideas through different digital devices. Rejecting the idea of the platform as a single, self-sufficient digital space, we propose to consider and analyze the cultural contributive platform as a cross-media, multi-space environment linking the digital spaces of amateurs and institutions, and capable of creating "frontier" zones capable of responding to diverse collective and individual expressive needs.

Biography

Marta Severo is a university professor of communication sciences at the University of Paris Nanterre and a junior member of the “Institut Universitaire de France”. She is co-director of the Dicen-IdF laboratory. Online participation and online contribution are among the research themes she is developing. She has obtained several funding (in particular the ANR COLLABORA project on cultural contributory platforms). In 2019, she joined the scientific council of OpenEdition. She has published several books around digital cultural practices: "Amateurs et institutions: perspectives historiques et explorations numériques" (2022, with F. Filipponi), “ L'impératif participatif : institutions culturelles, amateurs et plateformes » (2021), « Patrimoine culturel immatériel et numérique » (2016, with S. Cachat).

Fred Turner

The Uses of Art in Silicon Valley

  Every August, thousands of computer engineers drive out into a barren desert to live for a week in a community devoted to making art: the Burning Man Festival. All year long, the coders of Facebook labor at their desks, surrounded by murals made to look like street art. The question is: why? What does art do for workers focused on building new technologies? Analysts have often argued that art worlds inspire technologists to develop new tools and thereby, reshape both engineering and culture. This talk makes a different case. Drawing on extensive onsite research and dozens of interviews, it will show how, in Silicon Valley at least, art worlds model, legitimate and so provide a key cultural infrastructure for the new ways of working technology development requires.

Biography