Maker Anthropologist in the Tech Field: Interview with Astrid Countee (Interview #1 in the Interview Series)

Stephen Paff
2 min readSep 8, 2021

For my first interview in the Interview Series, I interviewed Astrid Countee. She is a business anthropologist and technologist with a background in anthropology, software engineering, and data science. She currently works as a user researcher at the peer-to-peer distributed company Holo, as a research associate at The Plenary, as an arts and education nonprofit, and as a co-founder of Missing Link Studios which distributes the This Anthro Life podcast.

You can find the interview here.

Over our conversation, we discussed the following:

  1. Astrid’s work as a technologist and anthropology
  2. Strategies for how to develop programming and data skills as an anthropologist
  3. Astrid’s experiences developing and using statistical and data science tools in her work
  4. The importance of maker anthropology

Our conversation touched on a variety of exciting topics, which I hope to follow-up on in more detail in the coming months. I hope you enjoy.

To learn more about Astrid and her work, see her LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/astridcountee

Here are the various items that she mentioned during the conversation:

Thanks, Astrid, for being willing to share your insights.

Next Interview in the Interview Series: https://ethno-data.com/schaun-interview-1/

Originally published at https://ethno-data.com on September 8, 2021.

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Stephen Paff

I am a data scientist and ethnographer passionate about integrating of these two fields in professional settings. For more details, see https://ethno-data.com.