As related in today’s NYT, here. The centerpiece of the article is Dr. Genevieve Bell, an Australian who used to teach at Stanford and now serves as Intel’s chief computational social scientist. In contrast to the folks we have here at Krasnow, Dr. Bell is an anthropologist by training and I would say is a social scientist who studies humans interacting with computers.
Intel is not my idea of a company that would hire an anthropologist at all, so the article was newsworthy. And some of the notions of clever ideas (for example the ‘billboards’ on your laptop’s cover) struck me as a bit iffy. I’d be really interested if IBM hired a corporate anthropologist with the same remit as Dr. Bell.
