Algorhythmics: Understanding Micro-Temporality in Computational Cultures
Abstract While in the terminology of the computational sciences an algorithm is often defined as a finite sequence of step-by-step instructions, which “bear a crucial, if problematic, relationship to material reality,”1 rhythm, a term closer to the study of cultural phenomena, shall be defined as an elementary movement of matter, bodies and signals, which oscillate [...]
Sensing an Experimental Forest: Processing Environments and Distributing Relations
Abstract The use of wireless sensor networks to study environmental phenomena is an increasingly prevalent practice, and ecological applications of sensors have been central to the development of wireless sensor networks that now extend to numerous ‘participatory’ applications. How might environmental sensing projects be understood as giving rise to new practices for sensing environmental processes, [...]
The Order of Places: Code, Ontology and Visibility in Locative Media
Abstract This paper explores the regimes of visibility of urban places inscribed in locative media by way of examining the ways in which space is encoded in these systems. I explore some contrasting configurations of these regimes through case studies of two location-enabled platforms: Flickr and Foursquare. Based on a reading of Yahoo’s patents as [...]
What is in PageRank? A Historical and Conceptual Investigation of a Recursive Status Index.
Abstract: This paper proposes an analysis, based in a software studies mindset, of Google’s PageRank algorithm. It develops two lines of investigation: first, it situates this ‘evaluative metric’ in a larger genealogy of ideas, concepts, theories, and methods that developed, from the 1930s onwards, around the fields of sociometry, citation analysis, social exchange theory, and [...]
Text, Speech, Machine: Metaphors for Computer Code in the Law
As computer software has become increasingly central to commerce and creativity, lawmakers have retrofitted it into preexisting legal regimes to regulate its production and distribution. Currently in the United States, software is eligible for protection under patent law, copyright law, trade secret law and the First Amendment. Legal determinations of technology such as software do [...]
Heterogeneous Software Engineering: Garmisch 1968, Microsoft Vista, and a Methodology for Software Studies
The foreword to MIT’s Software Studies series suggests its purpose is to “make critical, historical, and experimental accounts of (and interventions via) the objects and processes of software.”1 Methodologically diverse, the international field of software studies welcomes perspectives from the arts and humanities, the social sciences, as well as computer science and engineering. Recent proposals [...]
Nerves of data: the neurological turn in/against networked media
Over the last year or so, a loose idea, albeit one with ‘hard’ evidence, has been gathering speed – ‘the neurological turn’ in humanities and social science discourses, particularly in analyses of screen and new media technologies and reception. The neurological turn refers mainly to the resorting to neuroscience by non-neuroscientific scholars, journalists and commentators [...]
Inside Photoshop
Contemporary media is experienced, created, edited, remixed, organized and shared with software. This software includes stand-alone professional media design and management applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Final Cut, After Effects, Aperture, and Maya; consumer-level apps such as iPhoto, iMovie, or Picassa; tools for sharing, commenting, and editing provided by social media sites such [...]
Extended Carbon Cognition as a Machine
1 Introduction Carbon matters. And it is computed. In a culture. Underlying calculations are configured; and they could be configured otherwise. To open a space for conceptual discussion about carbon, this article attempts to reconstruct the extended and distributed practices of knowing carbon emissions with the help of scholarship from the field of Science and [...]
Thinking Beyond the Brain: Educating and Building, from the Standpoint of Extended Cognition
1. We have the Technology In a widely reported article published recently in Science, 1 a series of experimental results were described which together indicate that, in an era of laptops, tablets, and smartphones that come armed with powerful Internet search engines, our organic brains often tend to internally store not the information about a [...]
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