[Air-L] agency / neutrality of algorithms

Bernhard Rieder berno.rieder at gmail.com
Tue May 31 00:53:15 PDT 2016


Hi Alex,

Personally, I think that the notion of algorithm is way to broad to talk about “neutrality” (again, super vague) in very interesting terms.

But I would really recommend the volume by Custers et al. on Data Mining (http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-30487-3). They get the technology right (half of the authors are from CS/IS), but also they put something of substance behind the notion of neutrality.

Also, this paper by Barocas and Selbst on Big Data’s “disparate impact” (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2477899) is simply spectacular.

best,
Bernhard

> On 30 May 2016, at 21:36 , Alex Gekker <gekker.alex at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi list,
> 
> I've been running into a lot of writing criticising the notion of
> "algorithms are neutral" recently, but yet to find a scholarly work that
> tackles the subject yet. Any recommendations?
> 
> Here are some examples for the types of arguments I'm interested in:
> 
> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/go-tweak-yourself-facebook/480258/
> https://socialmediacollective.org/2016/05/18/facebook-trends/
> 
> thanks,
> Alex.
> 
> 
> =======
> 
> Alex Gekker, PhD Candidate (Promovendus), Media and Culture, Utrecht
> University.
> Charting the Digital http://www.digitalcartography.eu/
> http://alexgekker.com
> a.gekker at uu.nl <//a.gekker at uu.nl> |
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