Jones, Matthew L.

Greetings!
I have moved to the Princeton history department after many wonderful years at Columbia.
You can reach me there at mljones at princeton dot edu or through the information at my webpage www.nescioquid.org.
All best,
Matthew Jones
Smith Family Professor of History
Princeton University

Education

Ph.D. — Harvard University, 2000
M.Phil. — Cambridge University, 1995
B.A. — Harvard University, 1994

 

Interests and Research

Matthew L. Jones studies the history of science and technology, focused on early modern Europe and on recent information technologies. A Guggenheim Fellow for 2012-13 and a Mellon New Directions fellow for 2012-15, he is writing on book on computing and state surveillance of communications, and is working on Data Mining: The Critique of Artificial Reason, 1963-2005, a historical and ethnographic account of “big data,” its relation to statistics and machine learning, and its growth as a fundamental new form of technical expertise in business and scientific research.  His publications include: "Querying the Archive: Data Mining from Apriori to Page Rank," in L. Daston, ed. Archives of the Sciences (Chicago, 2016); Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Improvement, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (Chicago, 2016); “Improvement for Profit: Calculating Machines and the Prehistory of Intellectual Property,” in Mario Biagioli and Jessica Riskin, eds., Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014); The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2006).

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