PERSON
Lisa Gitelman
American media historian and cultural theorist (b. 1956), Professor of English and Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, whose framework of protocols and epistemic objects provides the sharpest available tools for analyzing AI's unsettled period.
Lisa Gitelman was trained in American Studies and has devoted her career to understanding how media technologies acquire cultural meaning through the institutional protocols that surround them. Her three major works — Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines (1999), Always Already New (2006), and Paper Knowledge (2014) — developed a coherent theoretical framework that has become foundational to media archaeology and critical data studies. Her edited volume "Raw Data" Is an Oxymoron (2013) established a rallying phrase for the critique of data as pre-cultural. Co-founder of NYU's Digital Theory Lab, which has studied deep learning since 2018, Gitelman has more recently turned her attention to AI-generated media, delivering lectures on typographical hallucinations in image-generating systems. Her method — treating media artifacts as cultural documents whose format, institutional context, and material properties are inseparable from their meaning — provides an analytical apparatus unusually well suited to the AI transition.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Gitelman's intellectual formation combines