Maria Eriksson is a guest researcher/lecturer at the seminar for media studies (focus Media Theory and Media History). Her research is located at the intersection of media studies, social anthropology, and science and technology studies and focuses on the interplay between culture and technology.

She received her doctoral degree at the Department of Culture and Media Studies at Umeå University, Sweden, in 2019. Her thesis explores the role of software technologies in online music distribution using digital and experimental methods and highlights the logistical role of software technologies – that is, their role in coordinating and arranging things, people, and information in time and space.

Eriksson is one of the co-authors of the book Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music (2019, MIT Press) and has previously published research on disruptive software updates, the cultural dimensions of music recommendation systems, and the infrastructural politics of online streams. 

In 2020-2022, she worked as a postdoc researcher within the project European History Reloaded, where her research focused on the critical analysis of audiovisual fingerprinting tools and other automated techniques for online content identification. Currently, she is involved in the research project Modern Times 1936, which aims to explore and critique how artificial intelligence interprets historic sources.

Visit this website if you want to know more about Eriksson’s work.

• Politics of AI
• Critical data studies
• Software studies
• Digital methods

Eriksson, M. & Heuguet, G. (2023). Interview with Aleksandra Kaminska, in Oral Histories of the Internet and the Web, edited by Niels Brügger and Gerard Goggin. Routledge: New York.

Eriksson, M., Skotare T., & Snickars, P. (2022).  Understanding Gardar Sahlberg with neural nets: On algorithmic reuse of the Swedish SF archive, in Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, Vol. 12. Issue 3.

Eriksson, M. & Guffond, J. (2021). Disassemble to Understand: Jasmine Guffond interviews Maria Eriksson, in Listen to Lists, edited by Lina Brion and Detlef Diederichsen. Leipzig: Spector Books.

Eriksson, M. & Heuguet, G. (2021). Genealogies of Online Content Identification: An Introduction in Internet Histories, special issue on the Genealogies of Online Content Identification.

Eriksson, M. (2020). The Editorial Playlist as Container Technology: Notes on the Logistical Role of Digital Music Packages in Journal of Cultural Economy 13(4).

Morreale, F. & Eriksson, M. (2020). “My Library Has Just Been Obliterated”: Producing New Norms of Use Via Software Updates, in Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Eriksson, M. et.al. (2019). Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music. MIT Press.

Eriksson, M. & Johansson, A. (2018). “Keep Smiling!": Time, Functionality and Intimacy in Spotify’s Featured Playlists in Cultural Analysis 16.