/// CV
CURRENT POSITIONS
January 2023–(ongoing until 2026). Researcher within the project Modern Times 1936, funded by Riskdagens Jubileumsfond.
May 2019–(ongoing). Guest researcher/lecturer at Departement Künste, Medien, Philosophie, Universität Basel. Seminar für Medienwissenschaft.
PREVIOUS POSITIONS
December 2019–2021. Postdoctoral fellow at Humlab, Umeå University within the project European History Reloaded: Curation and Appropriation of Digital Audiovisual Heritage. The project was a collaboration between scholars at Utrecht University, the Institute of Contemporary History in Prague, and Umeå University.
2014-2019. Doctoral Candidate in Media and Communication Studies. Department of Culture and Media Studies, Umeå University. My PhD position had a digital humanities profile and was funded by the Swedish Research Council as part of a 5-year interdisciplinary research project entitled Streaming Cultural Heritage: Following Files in Digital Music Distribution. I defended my dissertation with the title Online Music Distribution and the Unpredictability of Software Logistics at Umeå University on November 22, 2019. Supervisors: Pelle Snickars (Umeå University) and Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm University/Martin Luther University, Halle).
2014-2019. Affiliated researcher at Humlab, Umeå University. My primary work at Humlab involved organizing seminars, workshops, and conferences.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Politics of AI
Critical data studies
Software studies
Digital methods
EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND
2012–2014. Master’s degree in Social Anthropology. Stockholm University. Thesis title: Re-making Film – Creativity and Meaning in the Production and Circulation of Pirate Copied Film. Supervisor: Paula Uimonen.
2009-2012. Bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology. Stockholm University. Thesis title: Lines Filled with Meaning - A Ritual Analysis of the Use of Diagrams in Economic Education. Supervisor: Anette Nyqvist.
PUBLICATIONS
2023 · Interview with Aleksandra Kaminska, co-edited with Guillaume Heuguet in Oral Histories of the Internet and the Web edited By Niels Brügger and Gerard Goggin. Routledge: New York.
2022 · Understanding Gardar Sahlberg with Neural Nets—On Algorithmic Reuse of the Swedish SF-archive. Co-written with Pelle Snickars and Tomas Skotare in Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 12(3).
2021 · Dataflöden och infrastruktur in Digitala Metoder, edited by Johan Jarlbrink and Fredrik Norén. Publisher: Studentlitteratur. [Book chapter on Data Flows and Infrastructure, published in an anthology about Digital Methods, in Swedish].
2021 · Genealogies of Online Content Identification: An Introduction. Co-written together with Guillaume Heuguet in Internet Histories, special issue on the Genealogies of Online Content Identification.
2021 · Interview with Aleksandra Kaminska. Co-edited together with Guillaume Heuguet in Internet Histories, special issue on the Genealogies of Online Content Identification.
2021 · Disassemble to Understand: Jasmine Guffond interviews Maria Eriksson in Listen to Lists, edited by Lina Brion and Detlef Diederichsen. Leipzig: Spector Books. Part of the publication series Das Neue Alphabet (The New Alphabet) Vol. 2, published by Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Exists in a German and English edition. An audio version of Jasmine’s interview with me was also broadcasted by Noods Radio on November 16, 2020.
2021 · Listening Back: Maria Eriksson interviews Jasmine Guffond in Listen to Lists, edited by Lina Brion and Detlef Diederichsen. Leipzig: Spector Books. Part of the publication series Das Neue Alphabet (The New Alphabet) Vol. 2, published by Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Exists in a German and English edition.
2020 · The Editorial Playlist as Container Technology: Notes on the Logistical Role of Digital Music Packages in Journal of Cultural Economy 13(4). Special issue with the title Mapping the Intermediate: Lived Technologies of Money and Value.
2020 · “My Library Has Just Been Obliterated”: Producing New Norms of Use Via Software Updates. Co-written together with Fabio Morreale in Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Received an Honorable Mention Award and was ranked among the top5% of the 2283 articles that were submitted to the CHI 2020 conference.
2019 · Online Music Distribution and the Unpredictability of Software Logistics. Dissertation submitted to Umeå University in accordance with the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities. Umeå: Cityprint i Norr AB.
2019 · Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music. Co-written together with Rasmus Fleischer, Anna Johansson, Pelle Snickars, and Patrick Vonderau for MIT Press.
2018 · Unpacking Online Streams. APRJA 7(1), special issue on Research Values.
2018 · “Keep Smiling!": Time, Functionality and Intimacy in Spotify’s Featured Playlists. Co-written together with Anna Johansson. Cultural Analysis 16, special issue on The Inheritance of the Digital: Ethnographic Approaches to Everyday Realities In, Of, and Through Digital Technologies.
2017 · Tracking Gendered Streams. Co-written together with Anna Johansson in Culture Unbound 9(2), special issue on Spotify and Digital Methods.
2016 · Close Reading Big Data: The Echo Nest and the Production of (Rotten)Music Metadata. First Monday 19(2).
2016 · A Different Kind of Story: Tracing Regulations and Narrations of the Re-Birth of Pirate-Copied Films. Tecnoscienza, Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies 7(1), special issue on Digital Circulation: The Digital Life of Things and Media Technologies.
2016 · Review of Richard Roger’s book Digital Methods. Nordicom Information 38(3). [In Swedish]
PEER REVIEW UNDERTAKINGS
2022 · Lychnos: Annual of the Swedish History of Science Society. Special issue on Digital History.
2021 · Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval. Special issue on Music Creativity and AI.
2020 · Anthology on Participatory Approaches to Music & Democracy, published by the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna.
2020 · Norsk Medietidskrift. Special issue on Music and Media.
2020 · Popular Music & Society. Special issue on Music, Digitalization, and Democracy.
2018 · View: Journal of European Television History and Culture. Special issue on Audiovisual Data in the Digital Humanities.
GUEST EDITORSHIPS
2022-2023 · Journal of Digital History. Special issue on Digital Methods. Together with Pelle Snickars. Forthcoming.
2021 · Internet Histories. Special issue on the Genealogies of Online Content Identification, together with Guillaume Heuguet (Sorbonne Nouvelle). With contributions from Wolfgang Ernst, Brian Justie, Gavin Feller, and Andrew Ventimiglia. Link.
2017 · Culture Unbound. Special issue on Spotify and digital methods, together with Anna Johansson, Pelle Snickars, Rasmus Fleischer and Patrick Vonderau. Link.
TEACHING
/// UNIVERSITY OF BASEL
My teaching in Basel is connected to the Seminar for Media Studies under Markus Krajewski’s professorship. It has involved (or is planned to involve) seminars with roughly 20 students and 2 hours of in-class teaching per week, focusing on the following topics:
2023 · Media Infrastructures, Hidden Labor and Fantasies of Automation. Spring semester. This seminar explores the hidden human labor that makes media infrastructures appear as autonomous. Throughout history, media infrastructures have often been portrayed as automatic systems that erase challenges of time and space and remove the need for manual human work. However, media infrastructures are rarely fully automatic and frequently require extensive manual labor to function. Just like messenger boys were covertly employed to transport handwritten messages within the electrical telegraph system in the late 19th century, today’s social media platforms are maintained by hidden human content moderators who monitor and keep online platforms “clean.” What cultural, political, and economic logics characterize historic and contemporary infrastructural “ghostwork”? How has the concealment/erasure of certain types of human labor shaped conceptions of media infrastructures and technologies? By studying how fantasies of automation are maintained by the erasure/concealment of manual work, the seminar will provide opportunities to discuss the politics of media infrastructures in relation to topics such as class, gender, and ethnicity.
2021 · Introduction to Sound Studies. Fall semester. Course description: This seminar provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of sound studies and explores how sound has been captured, designed, controlled, and utilized for multiple purposes throughout history. The seminar will explore topics such as eavesdropping, psychoacoustics, functional/programmed music, and the use of sound/music in warfare. Students will also discuss the cultural history of concepts such as noise and silence and study how the cultural role of sound has transformed in tandem with social, economic, political, and technological developments.
2021 · Software Studies. Spring semester. Course description: This seminar introduces key texts in the field of software studies and explores different ways of studying code, algorithms, and computer programs from a humanistic perspective. The seminar literature will discuss the functionality and nature of individual software features (such as protocols and if… then statements) and highlight the role and function of software in a range of human domains such as cities, homes, medicine, finance, and art. How can computational and networked digital media be theorized? What conditions of possibility do different software technologies establish? And how does the increased delegation of mental processes to software systems affect our ways of living, being, and generating knowledge?
2020 · History and Theory of Information Filters. Fall semester. Course description: This seminar explores historical and contemporary efforts to filter and regulate flows of information, focusing on both manual and automated efforts to sort, clean, and govern communication. The seminar highlights how information filters work on a practical and hands-on level, but also provides opportunities to reflect on the political dimensions of attempts to separate signals from noise. The seminar literature sheds light on filtering logics from a broad range of perspectives, stretching from state censorship in the colonial British Empire (Darnton, 2014), the history of spies and central intelligence bureaus in early modern Venice (Iordanou, 2016), historical efforts to purify spoken language and its connection to urban sanitation projects (Laporte, 2000), and struggles to industrialize the filtering of news around the turn of the 20th century (Popp, 2014). These readings will also be paired with discussions concerning contemporary filtering techniques, such as spam filters (Parikka and Sampson, 2009), search engine filtering (Elmer, 2009), ‘smart’ noise-cancellation devices (Hagood, 2019), and efforts to remove violent and obscene content from social media (Gillespie, 2018; Roberts, 2019). What is an information filter? How does information filtering work? And what fantasies of informational purity and order do different filtering efforts promote?
2020 · Music, Power, and Digital Technology. Spring semester. Course description: The aim of this seminar is to explore and critically discuss how digital technologies shape people’s ways of interacting with music online. Since the 1990s, the distribution of music has increasingly moved into the digital domain, and music applications such as Spotify, SoundCloud, and YouTube now play a significant role in regulating how audiences reach music. How are digital platforms for music similar and/or different from the distributive systems that came before them? What cultural ideas and norms are built into online services for music, and how do they shape listener’s ways of finding, enjoying, and engaging with music? What role do formats, protocols, and compression techniques play in deciding how music moves and circulates in the online domain? And what happens when important decisions regarding music are increasingly outsourced to algorithms, software technologies, and ‘intelligent’ machines? In the seminar, we will discuss topics such as the politics of music recommendation systems, the cultural and financial dynamics of music interface design, and the hidden means by which user data is monetized and transformed into value on online platforms for music.
/// UMEÅ UNIVERSITY
My teaching at Umeå University took place at the Department of Culture and Media Studies and amounted to 911 teaching hours in total. I have finalized one course in pedagogics entitled Teaching in Higher Education, organized by the Centre for Educational Development at Umeå University (Sep-Oct 2015). In detail, my teaching consisted of the following courses:
2017-2019. Methods for Exploring Digital Environments. Spring semester. Role: Lecturer, seminar host, and assisting examiner. Graduate-level. 120 teaching hours in total. Lectured on qualitative methods and digital ethnography. Picked out course literature, designed written student assignments, moderated forum discussions, planned/recorded three online lectures, and assisted in student examinations.
2015-2018. Digital and Social Media. Campus course. Fall semester. Role: Lecturer, seminar host, and assisting examiner. Undergraduate level. 340 teaching hours in total. Planned and held lectures + seminars on algorithmic knowledge production, big data, digital materiality, and (digital) media infrastructures. Also assisted in the examination of students. Was appointed course coordinator in fall 2018.
2016-2018. Digital and Social Media. Online course. Fall semester. Role: Lecturer, seminar host, and assisting examiner. Undergraduate level. 130 teaching hours in total. Lectured on the use of social media within private/public organizations. Also moderated online seminars and assisted in student examinations. Was appointed course coordinator in fall 2018.
2018 · Communication and Media Analysis I, Scientific method. Spring semester. Role: Lecturer, seminar host, and assisting examiner. Undergraduate level. 127 teaching hours in total. Lectured on the theory and history of science and planned, organized, and held seminars on the same topic.
2016-2018. Communication and Media Analysis II, Scientific Method. Fall semester. Role: Lecturer. Undergraduate level. 64 teaching hours in total. Was co-responsible for the design and execution of a course section on interviewing techniques, which also included student supervision.
2015-2016 + 2018. Journalism, Media & Communication. Spring semester. Role: Supervisor and assisting examiner. Undergraduate level. 130 teaching hours in total. Supervised six to eight students each year in their B-level thesis work and assisted in student examinations. The topic of my student’s essays has for example included gender representations in computer games, young adult’s risk-assessments in online dating, and the effects of digitization on music consumption.
POSITIONS OF RESPONSIBILTY
By election:
2016-2018. Chair. Doctoral Candidate Association (Humdok) at the Faculty of Arts, Umeå University. Scope: 10% work time.
2016-2018. Board member. Humlab Board (Digital Humanities Lab) at the Faculty of Arts, Umeå University.
2016-2018. Board member. Faculty Board at the Faculty of Arts, Umeå University.
2015-2016 + 2018-2019. Board member. Doctoral Candidate Association (Humdok) at the Faculty of Arts, Umeå University.
2015-2016. Doctoral candidate representative. Committee of Employment, Faculty of Arts, Umeå University.
PUBLIC OUTREACH/JOURNALISTIC INTERVIEWS
2021 · Interview for German Radio station Bayern 2, concerning Spotify’s decision to patent a voice/speech recognition technology for detecting the mood of listeners and enhancing playlist recommendations. May 20.
2021 · Meeting with Ulrika Wendt, Lawyer and Public Affairs Manager at SAMI, Svenska Artisters och Musikers Intresseorganisation [SAMI, The Interest Organization for Swedish Artists and Musicians]. April 21.
2021 · Interview for the Swedish news magazine Flamman on artist’s increased demands for better royalty payouts from Spotify. Journalist: Tor Gasslander. March 4.
2021 · Interview for the magazine Stereogum on streaming’s raw power – and its ongoing mystery. Journalist: Nate Rogers. November 17.
2020 · Live interview for Swedish Public Radio channel/program P3 Nyheter on the topic of faked streams [In Swedish]. Journalist: Johanna Heed. February 27.
2019 · Live interview for Swedish Public Radio channel/program Musikguiden i P3 on fraud and manipulation on Spotify [In Swedish]. Journalist: Jessica Lindbom Jämting. December 20.
2019 · Interview for the French cultural magazine Les Jours, as part of the article series La fête du stream, episode #25. Journalist: Sophian Fanen. March 23.
2019 · Interview for Rolling Stone, together with Pelle Snickars. Our talk was eventually published in an article entitled ‘Spotify Teardown’ Is the Book Spotify Didn’t Want Published. Journalist: Amy X. Wang. February 12.