Jon Clindaniel

I am a computational anthropologist who studies the anthropology of and with computation. On the “of” side of my work, I examine how cultural meaning is encoded in material culture and its computational infrastructures — archaeological archives, museum databases, digital platforms, marketplaces, and AI systems that store, filter, and circulate cultural representations. On the “with” side, I build computational methods that enable anthropologists to connect local meaning-making to the large-scale, high-velocity information infrastructures that increasingly mediate cultural life. For me, “scale” is not simply a technical issue but a central site of anthropological inquiry: understanding contemporary culture requires tracing how small, situated practices become entangled with computational systems of expanding reach and accelerating pace.

I earned my PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University and currently teach Computational Social Science at the University of Chicago.