In this talk, Ted Striphas will explore the intellectual pathways leading to and out of his latest book, Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet (Columbia University Press, 2023). From Cambridge, England to Cambridge, Massachusetts by way of medieval Baghdad, Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet explores the critical junctures at which “algorithmic culture”—the application of computational decision-making to movies, music, news, knowledge, human relationships, and more—came to be defined in language long before it materialized in the technological wizardry of Silicon Valley. Striphas will provide a brief overview of the book, reflect on how the project shifted from its inception to the published volume, and explore some of the research challenges he faced (and continues to face) in his ongoing effort to map the political, historical, and semantic entailments of algorithmic decision-making.

TED STRIPHAS is Chair of the Department of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA, and coeditor of the journal Cultural Studies. His first book, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control, was published in 2009 by Columbia University Press. He is also coeditor (with John N. Erni) of The Cultural Politics of COVID-19 (Routledge, 2022).