a journal of software studies
Introduction The original Spanish title of Arturo Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse 1 uses the term disoñar to allude to “dreaming-designing” – a multitude of different ways through which humans think about the future, anticipate what will come, imagine alternatives, and construct new possibilities 2. In this paper, we describe two very different design investigations. …
The following is an exploration of the concept of opacity. While it operates in various modes with significant differences, they each share the commonality that in each instance opacity is a form of nonknowledge conditioning knowledge, and consequently functions as an active component in ways of being and knowing. Tracing this will entail a consideration …
Continue reading “Poetics of Machinic Opacity: Glissant and Bayes”
Prelude Mathematics is a strange attractor of ‘worldviews.’ From Plato to Alain Badiou, mathematics has been, and still is, a seductive vector along which various philosophical claims can be articulated. The role that certain currents of thought attribute to mathematics, and by extension to computing in some cases, can reveal a great deal about their …
During the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, which some consider to be the birthplace of AI research, the problem of artificial intelligence was posed as an attempt ‘to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves.’1 Here the link between symbolic …
Continue reading “Learning How to Learn: Abduction as the ‘Missing Link’ in Machine Learning”
1. Introduction Bayes Theorem has claimed an increasing number of applications and stimulated widespread interest, but remains largely studied in analytical terms as the preserve of statistics and probability theory. This article instead considers the significance of Bayes Theorem from the standpoint of qualitative social research. It draws upon conceptual resources from Science and Technology …
Continue reading “Subversive Witness: The Disruptive Influence of Bayes Theorem on Forensic Science”
As the morning sun filters through my windows, I greet the day with a simple, “Alexa, good morning.” The Amazon Echo’s blue ring glows, and Alexa’s voice responds cheerfully, “Good morning! Here’s your daily briefing.” She provides the weather, the latest news, and my schedule for the day, embodying the idea that frictionless interactive elements …
Almost twenty years ago, philosopher and literary theorist Katherine Hayles described the growth of programming languages. Unnoticed by most, new languages are springing into existence, proliferating across the globe, mutating into new forms, and fading into obsolescence. Invented by humans, these languages are intended for the intelligent machines called computers. Programming languages and the code …
Introducing the sayable through the visible Demis Hassabis, co-founder of London-based, Google-owned DeepMind, speaks of the shift from hacker culture to a scientific culture at Google AI, the arm of Alphabet Corporation leading on ML/AI: One reason we teamed up with Google back in 2014 was, Google …. came out of a research project that …
Continue reading “Generating samples: re-writing Bayes Rule as a probabilistic AI hack”
Introduction Between the years 2009 to 2013, one of us (hereafter referred to as the modeller) developed a so-called nutrient export coefficient model (ECM) in a Bayesian framework as part of an analytic-deliberative management project for the Tamar river catchment (UK). Modelling aimed to help stakeholders–land owners and land managers, government agencies, water companies, civil …
Building on previous critical theory approaches to an experiential paradigm of digital labour, this article considers the pervasiveness of further discursive formations of user experience (UX) apparent in workplace computational cultures.1 Closely aligned to broader ‘frictionless’ Silicon Valley ideologies,2 and an emotional turn in human computer interaction (HCI) research,3 UX has also become increasingly congruent …
The history of science and technology has, until relatively recently, neglected the study of textbooks. However, more recent scholarship has shown how important they have been, not only pedagogically, but also to the creation and direction of various fields like chemistry and physics.1 Arguably computer science textbooks are and have been pivotal for the field …
Introduction In 2013, Google announced the creation of a cloud-less, night-less, Spring-all-over image of the Earth. This new cloud-free image–assembled from a 40-year archive of satellite images–allowed anyone to see, with perfect clarity, any spot on the Earth’s surface. Creating this new image upgraded Google’s mapping products. Older and less-clear images were updated. Certain parts …
Introduction Between the years of 2013 and 2020, I carried out a multi-layered, intersectional interrogation of the supposedly obsolete programming language COBOL, with the aim to provide insights into aspects of global information architectures that are otherwise hidden and inaccessible. This led me to engage with a form of human-machine interchange that, unlike the ideal …
Continue reading “Spaces of Flaws of Flows: COBOL and the back-back-ends of development”
1. A platform for urban governance As the ‘smart city’ concept has spread globally within the last few years, there has been a growing chorus of critics suggesting urban governance has been de-politicised through the reduction of social problems towards data modelling and technical challenges1. In order to respond to these critiques, a lot of …
Introduction Charlton McIlwain’s Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter1 is a recent addition to a growing literature on computing and identity. The book asks us to confront an awkward truth: How a person is racially marked can help to account for how that person is likely to …
The authors of Spotify Teardown have written an important book. The first of what may soon become a cottage industry of texts about individual streaming services, Spotify Teardown shows what a multidisciplinary approach toward understanding Spotify can tell us about what drives the development of streaming services, and how they are changing media culture. Spotify …
Continue reading “Thinking Culture in the Age of Global Finance: A review of Spotify Teardown“
Introduction It rests on your desk: a small, surprisingly heavy, aluminum rectangular brick with 47 switches and a USB cable connecting it to the computer (Figure 1). Having constructed it from a kit, you must now ensure that it works before affixing keycaps. A message appears on the monitor from the operating system: ‘your keyboard …
Introduction Seemingly innocuous, even trivial, apps are profoundly enmeshed with the practices and habits of everyday life. Across the uniform grids in app stores and mobile GUIs, the icons of dating apps sit next to fitness apps, reading apps next to news apps, navigation apps and transport apps next to shopping apps, smart home apps …
This latest, somewhat overdue, issue of Computational Culture addresses draws together several different areas of research. The bulk of the articles in this issue of Computational Culture address apps and appification. Whilst the discussions by the seven contributions to this section of the issue are wide-ranging and testify to the plurality of ways of addressing …
Introduction In 2018, the number of mobile apps downloaded worldwide exceeded 194 billion, with consumers spending more than $101 billion USD in the two leading app stores operated by Google and Apple.1 With China accounting for nearly 40 per cent of total consumer spend, the app economy has become a truly global economic phenomenon. In …
Continue reading “Apps and Infrastructures – a Research Agenda”
Introduction ‘Tweets coming soon.’ ‘All movements have a beginning.’ These were the first two tweets published to the AppDeveloperUnion (@AppDevUnion) twitter account. They were published on Jun. 7, 2012, strategically timed a few days before Apple’s annual WorldWide Developers Conference. A dozen or so other tweets came from the account over the next four days, …
Continue reading “App-ed Out: Logics of Success and Failure in App Stores”
Introduction In May 2018, Instagram announced a new feature for users to share feed posts to their own Instagram Stories.1 This practice of ‘resharing’, as Instagram calls it, had already been introduced over six years prior in a third-party app called Regram,2 a popular app with over 500,000 downloads addressing the platform’s lack of support …
Continue reading “Regramming the Platform: Infrastructural Relations between Apps and Social Media”
Introduction Numerous and widely used, dating apps collect and connect detailed personal data across platforms. They have therefore been responsible for integrating intensive modes of personal data collection and computational decision-making into intimate social life, and, in parallel, for integrating these personal and intimate modes of communication into the platform-dominated digital media environment’s logics and …
Continue reading “Dating Apps and Data Markets: A Political Economy of Communication Approach”
A Data Infrastructure Approach to App Studies In early 2018, as a result of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook limited the types of data that third-party apps could access through its application programming interfaces (APIs). 1 Facebook one-sidedly implemented a new data governance model, 2 limiting access to the personal information – such as relationship …
Introduction The relationship between mobile technologies and policing in the United States is not a new one. In-car computers and scanners, hand-held recording devices, radios and cameras have been deployed in the field for decades. The last decade has been characterized by a steady rise of networked information technologies and resources that have co-constituted new …
Introduction Twitter is not only a platform for the circulation of all kinds of messages; it is simultaneously an interface that makes this very activity explicitly visible. It is a highly reflexive infrastructure, as it automatically produces dynamic accounts of its infrastructural activity. I assume that these accounts are in no way a secondary, ex-post …
Introduction Since Frank Rosenblatt’s Perceptron – a neural network processing ‘[visual] inputs impinging directly from the physical environment’1 developed between 1957 and 1961 – computer vision has been a defining function of machine learning. While the Perceptron never reached the level of accuracy at image classification tasks that its military funders were hoping for, the …
Continue reading “Infrastructure of Vision: Envisioning the Future through Market Devices”