PERSON
Lisa Gitelman
The media historian who showed that every new technology enters the world wearing borrowed clothes—that formats are never neutral, that data is always cooked, and that the conventions forming around AI-assisted production right now will feel
inevitable once they settle, just as the convention of the single-authored book feels inevitable now.
Lisa Gitelman is a historian of media and communication whose work has given the age of artificial intelligence some of its most indispensable diagnostic tools. Her concept of
media protocols—the vast clutter of normative rules, institutional practices, and default assumptions that gather around any new communication technology—explains why AI-assisted cultural production currently looks so much like what came before: the protocols of print culture are being borrowed to frame a medium they were not designed to describe. Her edited volume
“Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron demonstrated that data is never found but always made—shaped by the instruments that collect it, the institutions that commission it, and the assumptions embedded in what counts as data at all—a claim that applies with full force to AI training corpora, which are not the whole of human knowledge but a historically specific, institutionally mediated, materially constrained subset of it.