Papers

“Social experts within and without: social epistemologies and the Netflix competition in the making of machine learning,” Social Studies of Science (under review)

“Writing Data into the Histories of Computing and Information,” Writing Computer and Information History:Approaches, Reflections, and Connections, ed. William Aspray (forthcoming)

With Richard Staley, Sarah Dillon, Stephanie Dick, Jonnie Penn, Syed Mustafa Ali, eds. “Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power,” British Journal of the History of Science THEMES special issue (2023)

“Users gone astray: spreadsheet charts, junky graphics and statistical knowledge,” Osiris 38(2023):185-204.

“AI in History,” The American Historical Review 128, no. 3 (September 26, 2023), 1360–67.

“Decision trees, random forests, and the genealogy of the black box,” Algorithmic Modernity: Mechanizing Thought and Action, 1500-2000, Massimo Mazzotti and Morgan Ames, ed. (Oxford, 2023), 190-215.

“Programming,” in Information: A Historical Companion. Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja Goeing, Anthony Grafton, eds. (Princeton University Press, 2020), 703-708.

“Creating Uncertainty, Casting Doubt: US Intelligence Leaks from Intelligence Reform to Spyware for Sale,” in Exposing Secrets: The Forgotten History of U.S. National Security Whistleblowing and the Challenge of Dissent, Kaetan Mistry and Hannah Gurman, eds. (Columbia University Press, 2019), 243-270.

“How We Became Instrumentalists (Again): Data Positivism since World War II.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 48, no. 5 (November 1, 2018): 673–84.

The spy who pwned me, Limn, edd. Chris Kelty and Biella Coleman, Issue 8.

“Calculating Machine” in Maria-Rosa Antognazza, ed. Oxford Handbook of Leibniz (Oxford, 2018).

“Calculating Devices and Computers,” Companion to the History of Science, ed. Bernie Lightman (Wiley, 2016). Preprint

“Querying the Archive: Database Mining from Apriori to Page-Rank,”Science in the Archive, Lorraine Daston, ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Preprint

“Data and Hubris” in Rachel Schutt and Cathy O’Neill, eds. Doing Data Science (O’Reilly, 2014).

“Reason, Calculating Machines and Efficient Causation” in Tad Schmaltz, ed. Efficient Causation: The History of a Concept (Oxford, 2014).

“Space, Evidence, and the Authority of Mathematics in the Eighteenth Century” in Aaron Garrett, ed. Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Philosophy (Routledge, 2014).

“Improvement for Profit: Calculating Machines and the Prehistory of Intellectual Property,” Mario Biagioli and Jessica Riskin, eds., Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2012).

“d(scientist)/dt,” Science 333(2011):1382-3. (Review of Peter Harrison, Ronald Numbers and Michael H. Shank, eds. Wrestling with Nature: From Omens to Science [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011]).

Essay review of Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, (2007), Metascience, 21 (2012).

Essay review of Emilie Du Châtelet, Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings. Bour and Zinsser, trans. (2009) H-France 11(2011), No. 229.

“Matters of Fact” [Essay review of Harold Cook, Matters of Exchange (Yale 2007)] Modern Intellectual History 7,3 (2010): 629-642.

“Three Errors about Indifference: Pascal on the Vacuum, Sociability and Moral Freedom,” Romance Quarterly 50(2003):99-120.

“Writing and Sentiment: Blaise Pascal, the Vacuum and the Pensées,”  Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 32(2001):139-181.

“Descartes’ Geometry as Spiritual Exercise,” Critical Inquiry, 28(2001): 40-71; reprinted in Bill Brown, ed. Things. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004): 40-71.