ABOUT ME

I am a media scholar who studies the history and politics of everyday digital technologies. My research is located at the intersection of software studies, media archaeology, social anthropology, and science and technology studies and focuses on the interplay between culture and technology.

Since May 2019, I am visiting the Departement Künste, Medien, Philosophie at Universität Basel, where I teach and conduct research at the Seminar für Medienwissenschaft. Currently, I am involved in the research project Modern Times 1936 (Lund University, Sweden), which aims to explore and critique how artificial intelligence interprets historic sources.

Previously, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Humlab, Umeå University within the EU-funded research project European History Reloaded: Curation and Appropriation of Digital Audiovisual Heritage (also called CADEAH). My postdoc research focused on the critical analysis of audiovisual fingerprinting tools and other automated techniques for online content identification. It also explored the extent to which such tools can (and cannot) be re-purposed for humanistic archival research.

On the 22nd of November 2019, I defended my dissertation Online Music Distribution and the Unpredictability of Software Logistics at the Department of Culture and Media Studies at Umeå University, Sweden. In my thesis, I used digital and experimental methods to explore the role of software technologies in online music distribution. My work highlighted the logistical role of software technologies – that is, their role in coordinating and arranging things, people, and information in time and space. My post-graduate studies were funded by the Swedish Research Council and took place within the interdisciplinary research project Streaming Cultural Heritage: Following Files in Digital Music Distribution.

I am a co-author of the book Spotify Teardown which has been featured in Rolling Stone, Financial Times, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Salon and other journals/news outlets. I have also published research about disruptive software updates, the cultural dimensions of music recommendation systems, and the infrastructural politics of online streams.

Currently, I am thinking about the politics of AI-powered image upscaling technologies and how machines are increasingly deployed to distinguish between “human” and “AI” produced content.