Algorithmic Black Boxes as a Challenge for Media StudiesThe primary source for the suspicion with which the rise of and subsequent dependency on software as research instrument in the humanities is met, is that one does not know what the machine does. In many cases 'machine' means algorithm. Algorithmic black boxes have become so widespread that this objection could already be voiced as soon as a researcher uses Google. In digital methods and beyond, there is a dominant tendency for research processes to be dependent upon algorithmic black boxes, which even theoretically cannot be 'opened' (Bucher 2012). Kate Crawford speaks in this context of the 'disappointingly limited calls for algorithmic "transparency", which seem doomed to fail ' (2016: 11).The dependency on algorithmic black boxes has been addressed as a problem for research practices by Bernhard Rieder and Theo Röhle (2012). They have called 'black-boxing' one of the major challenges for digital methods, and continue their pursuit for a solution along the same lines in this volume. They delineate this technical black-boxing as a matter of accessibility (such as in the case of 'the' Google algorithm or countless other proprietary algorithms) and code literacy (cf. ibid.: 76), but also as not-understandable on a 'more abstract' level, as 'the results they produce cannot be easily mapped back to the algorithms and the data they process' (ibid.). Still, Rieder and Röhle propose this should not keep us from using them, as there is a workaround to this, which is 'to use different tools from the same category whenever possible in order to avoid limiting ourselves to a specific perspective' (ibid.: 77). Different algorithms would bring different aspects of a data set to the fore when one experiments with them, switches between different ones, etc.. Thus what Rieder and Röhle have proposed -and continue to seek for in this volume with their focus on the 'bizarre amount of knowledge we have stuffed into our tools' (Rieder & Röhle in this book) -are ways to minimise the size of black boxes by enlightening formerly black parts.With this article however, we would like to draw attention to an approach from a different direction. Instead of focusing on how to gain positive
This article analyses the interplay between movement and stasis on Western European inland waterways by looking at four different orderings: navigational, regulatory, market, and intimate. These orderings are ongoing situated practices, which actors carry out in distributed sociomaterial assemblages. This was investigated through ethnographic fieldwork that was not only mobile, but also distributed across sites, both on land and the water. When following different actors, the key is to follow the action through which they are connected. Mobilising and immobilising ships is also achieved from land by control room operators, cargo brokers, family members and non-human actors like radar networks, geolocative AIS apps, and water level databases. It became clear that often actors need to give market orderings priority and rearrange their position in other orderings accordingly, which results in palpable pressure, manifested in different problems that all concern time. Skippers take risks to be just in time, to find resting time and to mediate asynchronous rhythms of loved ones on land, all the while maintaining critical spatio-temporal separation with riverbed, embankment and other ships. Media play an important role in the assemblages: they keep separate what would otherwise collide and connect to deal with separation.
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