Caitlin
Petre

Caitlin Petre examines the social and material implications of an increasingly data-saturated world, with particular attention to the relationship between digital technologies, expertise, and media industries. Using field research methods, she analyzes how new sources of quantitative data interact with long-established approaches to cultural production and the management of media workers.

Caitlin Petre studies the social processes behind the digital datasets and algorithms that increasingly govern the contemporary world. Using qualitative research methods such as ethnographic observation and in-depth interviewing, she maps the complex relationships between digital analytics, the social actors who create them, and the established experts who make use of them.

Her current book project, which is under contract with Princeton University Press, explores how audience analytics are reshaping the work of journalism. In today's commercial newsrooms, journalists are increasingly judged based on the number of clicks, likes, shares, and “attention minutes” their articles generate. Drawing on more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork at the New York Times, Gawker Media, and Chartbeat (a leading analytics company), Petre delivers a behind-the-scenes account of these metrics, and explores their implications for democratic discourse, workplace power distributions, and the very notion of editorial judgment.