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Section Editorial: Critical Approaches to Computational Law

Introduction The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, Regulation (EU) 2016/679) came into effect on 25th May 2018. The GDPR revises and extends the previous Data Protection Directive (Directive 95/46/EC) of 1995 but also introduces new areas of regulation relating to algorithmic processing and what it calls “Automated individual decision making.”1 Since the spread …

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Software As Dispute Resolution System: Design, Effect and Cultural Monetization

Introduction Many artists are dependent on popular audiovisual distribution platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, Daily Motion and others. While Vimeo requires a paid subscription for fast streaming,1 Youtube has, until now, the largest participation since it offers free service for high speed streaming, (nonetheless with the insertion of advertisements). The platform has more revenue plans, …

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Algorithmic Legal Reasoning as Racializing Assemblages

Introduction Predictive analytics use a variety of techniques (e.g., statistical methods, machine learning algorithms) to make predictions about future events. 1 Although predictive analytics have been used in many disciplines since the early 20th century (e.g., actuarial science, business intelligence, financial forecasting), increasingly, this computationally intensive technique has been employed by law enforcement and other …

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Throbber: Executing Micro-temporal Streams

Loading webpages, waiting for social media feeds, streaming music, movies and other multimedia content are mundane activities in contemporary culture. Such mundane activity includes the involvement of network-connected devices from fixed desktop computers to portable tablets and smart watches, all involving data transmission and distribution across multiple sites—referred to as data. In these scenarios, data, …

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The Socio-Technical Background of an Unconventional Software Architecture in OpenStreetMap: Understanding the Implementation of ‘Folksonomy’

1. Introduction From the 1960s onwards, analogue cartography has been rapidly and comprehensively replaced. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) were progressively developed to capture, process, analyze, and map digital geodata 1. With the emergence of the interactive internet, digital geoinformation and cartographic representations are undergoing another fundamental transformation 2. This transformation is often labeled with the …

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geographies of (con)text: language and structure in a digital age

Introduction What happens when words become data? Now that almost all language is in some way digitised, ‘data-ised’ and submitted to computation, the ownership, control and organisation of linguistic and other data can have a profound, yet not always intentional or indeed predictable, impact on social, cultural and political discourse, and on personal freedoms and …

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Editorial, Issue Six

Welcome to issue six of Computational Culture. We offer this issue at what is in some ways a particularly lively moment. The discussion of certain large scale software systems and the effects, in political and psycho-social terms, of the detail and scale of their design has become a matter for public concern. Facebook, Twitter and …

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Welcome to the Polygon: Contested Digital Neighborhoods and Spatialized Segregation on Nextdoor

Introduction Common-sense ideas about where a city’s neighborhoods begin and end rarely coincide entirely with the discrete and unyielding borders plotted on maps or entered into digital data structures. While paper maps depicting urban neighborhoods changed only incrementally and had a limited range of uses (navigation, tourism, government services), today neighborhood boundaries and names propagate …

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Artificial Rhetorical Agents and the Computing of Phronesis

Introduction On a cold night in Ulm, Germany on November 10, 1619, René Descartes received a series of dreams in which a ‘mirabilis scientiae fundamenta’ was revealed to him. As he recounts in his autobiography A Discourse on Method, this foundation for a wonderful science was to be built upon mathematics and promised to unite …

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From WIMP to ATLAS: Rhetorical Figures of Ubiquitous Computing

Introduction “In the new millennium, and notably after 2005, as a citizen of more or less massively networked information societies, one has already been interacting enough beyond command-lines, menus, desktops, and GUIs to have realized that another set of models is operative, and that there is at this point an obvious need to pursue analyses …

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‘Can We Name the Tools?’ Ontologies of Code, Speculative Techné and Rhetorical Concealment

Introduction /* No one is born happy. */ pcity -> ppl_happy [0] = 0; city.c, FreeCiv In her essay ‘Should We Name the Tools?’ Carolyn R. Miller identifies a contradictory impulse within the history of rhetoric. On the one hand, a rhetor strives to conceal the deliberate use of rhetorical art (techné) in order to …

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Rhetoric Special Issue Editorial Introduction

Rhetoric and Computation What might rhetoric and computation illuminate when we view them together? At first glance, rhetoric and computation may seem like strange bedfellows, but they both find roots in philosophies of rigorous reasoning and symbolic logic. How might we systematize knowledge and communicate it accurately? How do we break complex patterns and ideas …

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The World of Edgerank: Rhetorical Justifications of Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm

Introduction: From hidden power to explicit vision Edgerank is an algorithm that composes the sequence of posts on a Facebook user’s News Feed, which is the first page one meets after logging in to Facebook. The name and existence of Edgerank is relatively well known, but in comparison to Google’s Pagerank algorithm1, very little research …

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Graph Force: Rhetorical Machines and the N-Arization of Knowledge

To exist is to be indexed by a search engine. Introna & Nissenbaum, 20001 Figure 1: Google’s Knowledge Graphs for Stokely Carmichael, c. March, 2014 (Left) and c. September, 2015 (Right) On May 16th, 2012, Google officially announced the launch of its Knowledge Graph. In the announcement, Google wrote that the Knowledge Graph was introduced …

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The ‘FizzBuzz’ Programming Test: A Case-Based Exploration of Rhetorical Style in Code

Introduction For the last several decades, rhetoric has increasingly been understood to play a significant role in communication occurring not just in discursive speech and writing acts but across numerous modes of meaning-making, including image, color, gesture, spatial arrangement, aurality, and procedure. For rhetoricians, recognizing that meaning is created and communicated across these modes serves …

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Divide and Share: Taxonomies, Orders and Masses in Facebook’s Open Graph

Introduction ‘Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life,’ according to the equally euphemistic and oddly reserved self-description of the most popular social media platform. If this slogan is taken seriously – which certainly seems opportune in the light of the ‘mass’ of a billion users – then the questions arise …

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Index Issue Three

Editorial for Issue Three Articles Michael Castelle, Relational and Non-Relational Models in the Entextualization of Bureaucracy Evelyn Ruppert, Not just another database: the transactions that enact young offenders Anne Helmond, The Algorithmization of the Hyperlink Taina Bucher, Objects of Intense Feeling: The Case of the Twitter API Reviews Thor Magnusson, On Creativity and Calculation: Attempts …

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Editorial Issue Three

With the rapid ascent of Big Data – always the capitals – into the vapour clouds of overheated, media-saturated publicity, and its condensation into the steady drip, drip of the recent Snowden leaks, questions about the generation, storage and processing of data have become a matter of concern for many. The thoughts and anxieties of …

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Relational and Non-Relational Models in the Entextualization of Bureaucracy

Introduction This paper addresses data management practices of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, specifically in the context of their use by large formal organizations. The most significant processual development in this period is the rise and subsequent dominance of data management systems using the relational model. 1 Such relational database systems—which organize information …

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Objects of Intense Feeling: The Case of the Twitter API

Introduction The past decade has seen a staggering rise of social media – online services that facilitate social interaction between its users. We live and breathe social media, as services like Facebook and Twitter have not only become household names, but something like actual households themselves – places people choose to live and socialize. Whilst …

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Algorhythmics: Understanding Micro-Temporality in Computational Cultures

Introduction Algorithms are mathematical and thus abstract structures, but should not be mistaken for algebraic formulae, since assignments or instructions operated by algorithms are non-reversible. They are vector-dependent and have built-in time functions. Their ties to machinic reality and operability make algorithms time-based and as such part of rhythmic procedures, which are able to cause …

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