[Air-L] Any sociological or STS research on machine learning?

[Dan L. Burk]

Dr. Burrell is being very modest here -- her recommendations are all
great stuff of course, but her piece is really required reading --
extraordinarily thoughtful and useful. 

Cheers, DLB 

-- 

Dan L. Burk
Chancellor's Professor of Law
University of California, Irvine
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2017-18 Fulbright Cybersecurity Scholar 

On 2018-01-12 09:25, Jenna Burrell wrote:

> Hi Stephen and AIR-L,
> 
> Yes, there's a lot of work by sociologists and STS researchers on machine
> learning, including books published in the last year or about to come out...
> 
> Virginia Eubanks book *Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile,
> Punish and Police the Poor* is about to come out. I believe it's an
> ethnography and that it deals, at least in part, with applications of
> machine learning (in areas like predictive policing).
> 
> There's a new book out by STS scholar Adrien Mackenzie *Machine Learners* -
> https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/machine-learners
> 
> Also look at what Nick Seaver has written. He has an ethnography coming out
> on music recommendation systems/algorithms (http://nickseaver.net/)
> 
> Malte Ziewitz did an ethnography of the search engine optimization industry
> and has done lots of work in this space - http://zwtz.org/
> 
> Marion Foucade has a deeply sociological read on this topic and has written
> a great piece about the "mechanisms" that produce "classification
> situations" which are consequential to life circumstances (she doesn't use
> the phrase machine learning, but certainly ML compose some of the
> underlying 'mechanisms' she is concerned with) - http://www.
> sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361368213000743
> 
> I've also written something in this space: "How the machine 'thinks':
> Understanding opacity in machine learning algorithms"
> http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2053951715622512 - I'm a
> sociologist and an ethnographer, though this particular piece isn't
> ethnographic.
> 
> This list just scratches the surface ... there's just so much work coming
> out in this space so I'll just offer some names of other people to look
> into: Solon Barocas, Karen Levy, Kate Crawford, Christian Sandvig, Tarleton
> Gillespie, Angele Christen, Mike Ananny, Nick Diakopolous, Luke Stark. Plus
> lots of people doing work in this space at Data & Society (
> https://datasociety.net/).
> 
> Jenna Burrell
> Associate Professor
> School of Information
> UC-Berkeley
> 
> On Fri, Jan 12, 2018 at 8:29 AM, Yosem Companys <ycompanys at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> From: Stephen Paff <stephen.paff at gmail.com>
>> 
>> Hello everyone,
>> 
>> I am conducting research into the anthropology of machine learning. Does
>> anyone know of ethnographies of the development, implementation, and/or use
>> of machine learning algorithms? Are there any sociologists, STS
>> researchers, or scholars from other related fields studying machine
>> learning whose work I should look into as well?
>> 
>> Sincerely,
>> Stephen Paff
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