Bernhard Rieder
Associate Professor of New Media and Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam
I teach in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam and work with the Digital Methods Initiative. My research focuses on the history, theory, and politics of software, and in particular on the role algorithms play in the production of knowledge and culture. Before coming to Amsterdam, I studied Communication, History, and Philosophy in Vienna and received my PhD from Paris 8 University, where I then taught at the Département Hypermédia.
Much of my work concerns large online platforms: how they rank and order information, how they shape cultural production and markets such as YouTube’s creator economy, and what political and economic challenges they pose for public scrutiny and regulation. More recently, this has extended to AI, from machine moderation to the political economy of foundation models. My book Engines of Order (Amsterdam University Press, 2020, open access) investigates the historical and conceptual foundations of the algorithmic techniques behind these systems.
Studying platforms empirically requires tools, and for about twenty years I have been writing research software, mostly for the data-driven analysis of social media. Some of it, like Netvizz and DMI-TCAT, did not survive the closing of platform APIs; YouTube Data Tools is still developed as part of the CAT4SMR project. I am interested in what it means to make such tools, and in how computational methods, and now AI, change the way we do research.
My publications and talks are on the research page, my tools on the software page, and the small Mac apps I make on the apps page. Longer thoughts occasionally appear on my blog, The Politics of Systems.