Teknoantropologisk Laboratorium

Hello fellow researchers of digital systems and infrastructures!

The team is excited to be hosting an open panel for the conference, titled: Waiting with infrastructures: The maintenance of resilient systems, from edge to center, and is open for accepting abstracts! 💡

We suggest that life with infrastructural systems is marked by endurance, postponement, and pausing and invite contributions that explore how practices of postponement, enduring and waiting shape the edges (Watts 2018) of infrastructural systems, but also how such practices are embedded within broader political, colonial, and temporal logics at the center of governance. How might ‘waiting around’ become sites for new forms of attention, sovereignty, and resilience?

We suggest ordering contributions around the following themes, but are open to broad takes on the theme of waiting with infrastructures:
- Waiting at the edge: How are practices of postponement part of the edges of infrastructures? How do edges function as zones of active waiting rather than passive delay?
- Colonial and political logics: In what ways are practices of waiting intertwined with colonial histories, governance, and power structures that shape infrastructural temporality?
- Infrastructures that wait: How might infrastructures ‘themselves’ wait? What does it mean for systems to be in a state of readiness, delay or pause?

We look forward to seeing you there!
https://easst.net/conference/easst2026/easst2026-home/
The call for Abstract closes March 9th

-progress

EASST2026 Home The conference will take place on the main campus of AGH University of Krakow, walking distance from the Krakow’s vibrant city centre.

This team just came back from their annual research retreat. The energy is palpable. New video coming out early next year. Props on the table...

Come along tomorrow for the EASA Apply Club and some computational anthropology discussion.

Are you planning on attending our No.12 this Friday? Get ready for an amazing talk with Anders Munk and find out more information upfront about his paper “The Thick Machine: Anthropological AI between explanation and explication” here: https://buff.ly/32cGpXw

…and don’t forget to register on Eventbrite!
👉 https://buff.ly/39dNsmq

New paper from lab members Anders Koed Madsen and Sofie Thorsen + former lab member Anders Grundtvig. Read about it here 👇

Anders Koed Madsen on LinkedIn: #softcitysensing #urbanplanning #data SOFT CITY SENSING? Today, Anders Grundtvig, Sofie Thorsen and I publish a paper that propose a framework for humanistic approaches to data-driven urbanism...

What makes people feel a sense of belonging to urban spaces? How does such sense of belonging differ from community to community? And how can we investigate this empirically? These are questions pursued by lab members Anders Koed Madsen and Sofie Thorsen in the project 'Urban Belonging'. The project has involved the design of an app for doing digital urban ethnography as well a series of workshops with various communities in Copenhagen. This Tuesday the project exhibits its first results at Urban 13. Come by from 17.00 for a drink and a discussion of belonging and inclusive cities.

with Drude Emilie Holm Ehn , Thorben Simonsen, Kathrine Norsk, Sabine Niederer, Maarten Groen, Carlo De Gaetano and others

More info at urbanbelonging.com

What can learn from Clifford Geertz? And how should we approach machine learning if the goal is thick description? New paper by Anders Kristian Munk, Mathieu Jacomy and Asger Gehrt Knudsen in Big Data & Society special issue about edited by Morten Axel Pedersen SODAS - Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science:

Geertz claimed that the goal of ethnography is explication rather than explanation. This was directly addressed to his contemporary ethnoscientists and their pursuit of cultural algorithms that would allow anyone to pass for a native in a foreign culture. Geertz disagreed. For him, culture was layers of meaning spun by man and ethnography the ongoing hermeneutic pursuit of interpretation. In that way, both natives and ethnographers are always engaged in explication, not explanation. No rules to be found at the bottom, turtles all the way down.

Conversely, the ethnoscientists were pursuing algorithms precisely because they thought it would lead them to discover rules. This corresponds well to the rule-based AI of their day (1960s) but not to e.g. neural networks that do not yield rules or explainability.

This leads the authors to explore how Geertzien thick description might cause us to rethink our relationship with machine learning and, indeed, explainable AI. They design a game where a neural network attempts to imitate first an ethnoscientist, then an interpretative anthropologist. They built an arcade machine for the lab and asked us to guess emoji reactions on Facebook against the neural network. It turned out we were about equally bad. The machine does not pass for a native on Facebook, but it does pass for a TANTlab ethnographer...

However, even though the Thick Machine (as it was ambiguously dubbed) would have passed for a native, the result would not have been a cultural algorithm, in the ethnoscientific sense, since the neural network cannot write out the rules. Yet, if we instead play to imitate the interpretative ethnographer, the first job is to identify situations where multiple layers of meaning make a situation deep, i.e. worthy of thick description. Turns out failures of the Thick Machine to predict point us to such situations. Interestingly, the lack of explainability is no longer such a problem if this is the objective. Just as explainability was never the ambition for Geertz.

The Thick Machine: Anthropological AI between explanation and explication - Anders Kristian Munk, Asger Gehrt Olesen, Mathieu Jacomy, 2022 According to Clifford Geertz, the purpose of anthropology is not to explain culture but to explicate it. That should cause us to rethink our relationship with m...

Video from Anders Kristian Munk's recent talk at the IT-Vest conference on digital and computational SSH. The main points:

Quit self-evidently equating:

1. computational methods with quantitativist ambitions
2. critique of computational practices with safe distance from those practices
3. SSH uptake of computational methods with user-friendliness and support

Anders Kristian Munk, TANTlab, Aalborg Universitet Anders Kristian Munk, lektor ved Tekno-Antropologisk Laboratorium (TANTlab) på Aalborg Universitet, ved konferencen 'Digitale modeller i samfundsvidenskabeli...

Torben Elgaard Jensen og Anders Koed Madsen er her interviewet om synergierne mellem 'Master i datadrevet organisationsudvikling' og vores engagement i projeket 'Algoritmer, Data og Demokrati'. Der er stadigt ledige pladser på holdet der starter i København i efteråret 2021.

Forskere i ADD-projektet står bag ny masteruddannelse i datadrevet organisationsudvikling - Algoritmer Torben Elgaard Jensen og hans team af teknoantropologer ved Aalborg Universitet leder arbejdet med teoriudviklingen i ADD-projektets store forskningsprojekt. Teamet står også bag en ny masteruddannelse, der skal bidrage til at løse en af digitaliseringens store udfordringer - nemlig manglen på d...