Interesting numbers: An ethnographic account of quantification, marketing analytics and facial coding data
本文通过人种志、历史和技术数据分析，探讨曾被主流心理学拒绝的面部编码法为何在当代营销中流行，认为其将量化任务从人转移到计算机，从而显得客观，为营销人员提供了超越数据本身的新理解方式。
This article asks why facial coding, a method for understanding emotions that was rejected by mainstream psychology for over century, has emerged as a popular method in contemporary marketing. Reading ethnographic, historic and technical data sets, the article argues that facial coding works because it shifts the task of quantification from humans to computers. This grants facial coding an appearance of objectivity that allows marketing practitioners to open up new ways of understanding, talking about and acting in markets that go beyond the data itself. Informed by science and technology studies, the article offers the concept of interesting numbers to illuminate these contradictory tendencies in the quantification of consumer behaviours. It alerts us to the importance of the agents and forms of quantification in selling a measure to marketers. In short, the article shows that, when it comes to marketing measures, the numbers count.