I have been reading Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Atria / One Signal Publishers, 2025), which is an interesting trip into the work of Spotify playlists. I got it on a hunch and it plays out very well against the previous Spotify book that I […]
I was reading You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song (McDonald, 2024) today while doing some initial research for an overview paper. I had high hopes for it, but found that it was very one dimensional. Questions about culture and algorithms are largely pushed to one side and limited to a few things with […]
I was recently re-reading Paula Bialski’s Middle Tech (Bialski, 2024), an ethnographic account of her time at a German software company that explores culture of Good Enough in software. It is an engaging book that seemingly moves against the Move Fast and Break Things culture, but I am wondering if it holds water there as […]
David Berry’s Stunlaw blog has a series of interesting posts that are building to something very useful as well as through provoking. The one that I want to focus is the recent one on Porosity and Computation. The term porosity comes from the Naples essay by Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis (Benjamin and L?cis, 1925) […]
This week, I went on another data walk in Coventry with some of our students in Digital Sociology. This meant that updating the Unheard City app in breaks while teaching another course. The app needed an update as the target software development kit (SDK) was an old one that also meant an update to most […]
Started teaching this week and the world still moves. Having had conversations with the other staff (that will be ongoing), I sketched out some ways of donating data from the Unheard City project and using phones around it. It is a challenge. No doubt the work will change and move, but it raises some interesting […]
After a holiday, it has been slow in getting back into gear. I picked up an administration task to help identify the courses that students had chosen. It was for our administration team and I had a few hours to complete it and get it live. It does need some work and there are a […]
I have been having a break recently so not much done. I did start some work on looking at the Maestro dataset metadata for a paper abstract. I have been querying it for the authors and mean times of the tracks (based on MIDI according to the website) as well as working on extracting some […]
A few months ago, I poked around the current permissions on the Android phone and to look at various ways of thinking about this as a reading or a history. One such drew from Fernand Braudel’s Long Duree. Using a series of tags on an old permissions file (this was originally done a couple of […]
