About

As a Harvard professor and researcher, I’ve spent more than twenty years uncovering how influence shapes our lives. My goal is to help you navigate these forces with clarity and ethics.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Engineering
• Epistemology
• Human–computer interaction
• Database
• Psychology
• Cognitive science

Selected publications

• Hopi Dreams and Anthropologists’ Dream Collection Strategies

  Revue d Histoire des Sciences Humaines · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A unique collection of over five hundred dreams transcribed from Hopi people—Native American families from the Hopi Pueblo group in the American Southwest—lies almost entirely forgotten in the archives and microcard records of a mid-20th century anthropologist named Dorothy Way Eggan (1901-1965). The article delves into the relationships Eggan pursued with Hopi people, especially Don Talayesva, a man who became quite famous in the 1940s and 1950s as the “Sun Chief” (the title of his autobiography, one of the first of a Hopi). Eggan was immersed in psychoanalysis but preferred to view dreams as cultural technologies defying a standard interpretation, Freudian or otherwise. The article examines how dreams were treated by the collector and the collected—the interpreter and the dreamer. Eggan believed Talayesva to be a “marginal man,” a concept borrowed from the sociologist Robert Park. Meanwhile, Eggan herself was a marginal woman in a way that enabled this unusual arrangement.

  PublisherDOI

• Liberate yourself by examining and analyzing

  Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Epistemology
  • Sociology

  This essay explores touchstones in the thought and teaching of Paul Rabinow, connecting his work on biosociality and modernizing practices to deeper commitments. The theme of “experiments in form” is explored and the question of the value of a life of inquiry is touched on.

  PublisherDOI

• CYBERNETICS/FEEDBACK

  Information · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Cognitive science
  PublisherDOI

• Database of Dreams

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2020 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Database
  • Computer Science

  An acclaimed science historian uncovers the fascinating story of a “lost” project to unlock humanity’s common denominator that prefigured the emergence of Big Data Just a few years before the dawn of the digital age, Harvard psychologist Bert Kaplan set out to build the largest database of sociological information ever assembled. It was the mid-1950s, and social scientists were entranced by the human insights promised by Rorschach tests and other innovative scientific protocols. Kaplan, along with anthropologist A. I. Hallowell and a team of researchers, sought out a varied range of non-European subjects among remote and largely non-literate peoples around the globe. Recording their dreams, stories, and innermost thoughts in a vast database, Kaplan envisioned future researchers accessing the data through the cutting-edge Readex machine. Almost immediately, however, technological developments and the obsolescence of the theoretical framework rendered the project irrelevant, and eventually it was forgotten.

  PublisherDOI

• Index

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  paratext1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Archiving Endangerment, Endangered Archives: Journeys through the Sound Archives of Americanist Anthropology and Linguistics, 1911–2016

  Technology and Culture · 2019-01-01 · 10 citations

  articleSenior author

  Under the salvage paradigm of Americanist anthropology during the early twentieth century, researchers gathered up all the evidence of groups under study-probing subjective experience, fixing elusive gestures, surveying cultures more globally and thoroughly than ever before. Fears about the widespread loss of "world" cultures motivated a variety of efforts to collect the most fleeting phenomena-dreams, rituals, rhythm, even the "life" of language. This article investigates the tension between ephemerality and preservation through two case studies of Americanist sound archiving: Indiana University's Archives of the Languages of the World, and the personal archive of Ishi (1861-1917), a Yahi speaker who became famous as the "last wild Indian." We emphasize the latent potential of recorded sound to speak across time as the basis of cultural and linguistic revitalization. We show how recordings make up a cycle of suppression and emergence-fueled by the technologies of preservation, storage, and analysis.

  PublisherDOI

• An Episode in the History of PreCrime

  Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences · 2018-11-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article traces the rise of “predictive” attitudes to crime prevention. After a brief summary of the current spread of predictive policing based on person-centered and place-centered mathematical models, an episode in the scientific study of future crime is examined. At UCLA between 1969 and 1973, a well-funded “violence center” occasioned great hopes that the quotient of human “dangerousness”—potential violence against other humans—could be quantified and thereby controlled. At the core of the center, under the direction of interrogation expert and psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West, was a project to gather unprecedented amounts of behavioral data and centrally store it to identify emergent crime. Protesters correctly seized on the violence center as a potential site of racially targeted experimentation in psychosurgery and an example of iatrogenic science. Yet the eventual spectacular failure of the center belies an ultimate success: its data-driven vision itself predicted the Philip K. Dick–style PreCrime policing now emerging. The UCLA violence center thus offers an alternative genealogy to predictive policing. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Histories of Data and the Database edited by Soraya de Chadarevian and Theodore M. Porter.

  PublisherDOI

• On being psychotic in the South Seas, circa 1947

  History of the Human Sciences · 2018-12-01 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article tells the story of an anthropologist and a research subject who encountered each other in the middle of the 20th century on an island in the southwestern Pacific. In the midst of an intensive spate of evidence gathering for his dissertation, anthropologist Melford Spiro noted that one of his would-be interlocutors, a man named Tarev – notable for failing all of his psychological tests – still managed to contribute a different form of evidence: if his views could not be amalgamated in numbers via test scores (and thus contribute directly to Spiro’s data set), they could still be rendered as a case. Tarev’s personality study, ‘A Psychotic in the South Seas’, counted as one of many cases contributing to a broad, worldwide effort to explore the meaning of suffering – specifically psychological illnesses – in non-Western cultures. This article examines Tarev’s rejected test-response ‘data’ and the ways in which his answers did not fit the epistemological and geopolitical frameworks that provoked them. The encounter between anthropologist and interlocutor, today, allows an investigation into how mid-20th-century scholars amassed ambitious data sets meant to revolutionize the sciences that dealt with human beings as psycho-social entities. What sorts of data made it into their archives and what sorts did not? How was the data of happiness, sadness and other fleeting emotional states collected from whole islands newly under US naval occupation?

  PublisherDOI

• Anthropology’s Most Documented Man, Ca. 1947: A Prefiguration of Big Data from the Big Social Science Era

  Osiris · 2017-09-01 · 13 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  “Big Data,” a descriptive term of relatively recent origin, has as one of its key effects the radically increased harnessing of ever-more-personal information accrued in the course of pedestrian life. This essay takes a historical view of the amassing and sharing of personal data, examining the genealogy of the “personal” and psychological elements inherent in Big Data through the case of an American Indian man who (the reigning experts claimed) gained the status of the most documented single individual in the history of modern anthropology. Although raised a traditional Hopi Indian in Oraibi, Arizona, Don Talayesva (1890–1985) gave over his life materials to scientists at prominent universities and constituted in and of himself a “vast data set” long before such practices were common. This essay uses this pioneering data set (partially preserved in the Human Relations Area Files and its web-based full-text database, eHRAF) to examine the distinctiveness of Big Data in relation to the personal, psychological realm; finally, a comparison is made with twenty-first-century data-collection practices of quantifying the self.

  PublisherDOI

• Hawthorne’s Renewal: Quantified Total Self

  2017-10-06 · 4 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michael D. Gordin

  10 shared

• Thomas Sturm

  Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats

  10 shared

• Lorraine Daston

  University of Chicago

  10 shared

• Paul Erickson

  Wesleyan University

  10 shared

• Judy L. Klein

  10 shared

• Jean-François Caro

  2 shared

• Judith Kaplan

  1 shared