• Gateways, sieves and domes: On the infrastructural topology of the Chinese stack 

      de Seta, Gabriele (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2021)
      This article proposes a topological model capable of accounting for the scale and complexity of China’s digital infrastructure. Beginning with the troubled development of a submarine data cable between Los Angeles and Hong ...
    • Huanlian, or changing faces: Deepfakes on Chinese digital media platforms 

      de Seta, Gabriele (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2021)
      In China, deepfakes are commonly known as huanlian, which literally means “changing faces.” Huanlian content, including face-swapped images and video reenactments, has been circulating in China since at least 2018, at first ...
    • Imagining machine vision: Four visual registers from the Chinese AI industry 

      de Seta, Gabriele; Shchetvina, Anya (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2023)
      Machine vision is one of the main applications of artificial intelligence. In China, the machine vision industry makes up more than a third of the national AI market, and technologies like face recognition, object tracking ...
    • Private messages from the field: Confessions on digital ethnography and its discomforts 

      Abidin, Crystal; de Seta, Gabriele (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2020)
      This special issue collects the confessions of five digital ethnographers laying bare their methodological failures, disciplinary posturing, and ethical dilemmas. The articles are meant to serve as a counseling stations ...
    • QR code: The global making of an infrastructural gateway 

      de Seta, Gabriele (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2023)
      This article traces the history of machine-readable data encoding standards and argues that the QR code has become an infrastructural gateway. Through the analysis of patents, corporate documents and advertising, ethnographic ...
    • Three lies of digital ethnography 

      de Seta, Gabriele (Journal article; Peer reviewed, 2020)
      The relative novelty of digital ethnography as a research methodology, along with the challenges that it moves to classical understandings of fieldwork, participation and representation, results in a repertoire of professional ...