What Should an Anthropology of Algorithms Do?

Seaver, Nick

doi:10.14506/ca33.3.04

Cited by 100 publications

(79 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Silverstein () demonstrated how statistics acted as technologies of commensuration for Turkey's attempts to join the European Union. A Cultural Anthropology series on algorithms (Ekbia and Nardi ; Lowrie ; Nafus ; Seaver ) explored algorithmic automation as a site of both containment and transformative opening, while Rea (, 500) analyzed temporality of digital gaming, attending to “calibration,” or measurement processes that “bring phenomena across different taskscapes into correspondence with one another.” Kravel‐Tovi (, 711) focused on the fascination with enumeration and counting in the context of American Jewry, building a metaphor of “accounting for the soul” to describe the many ways numbers come to matter for American Jews. Counting and commensuration become compelling objects through which to ethnographically analyze people's experiences of, and responses to, uncertainty and runaway change.…”

Section: Runaway Change: Crisis and Uncertaintymentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Doughty

2019

American Anthropologist

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This essay reviews articles produced in the four key American Anthropological Association cultural anthropology journals throughout 2018, and identifies the ways cultural anthropologists took up Haraway's invitation to "stay with the trouble" through implicit and explicit engagement with logics of captivity and its failures. This work suggests ongoing attention to long-standing themes in cultural anthropology-tensions between capture and escape, constraint and resistance, structure and agency-even as it suggests that captivity and its unruly failures can productively draw our attention to new ways of thinking about governance, temporality, scale, affect, political economy, posthumanism, ontology, care, and infrastructure. In this review, I ask: What can and cannot be contained in the contemporary moment, and what is at stake in that containment, or in the seepage that exceeds its borders?The review focuses on key ways anthropologists analyzed these long-standing questions anew in 2018: captivity and the nature of the human, dependency and exile, and violence and borders, and, by contrast, runaway change and uncertainty, unruly people and affects, and seeping waste and toxicity. Overall, I suggest that captivity and seepage provide productive provocations for further study. [year in review, sociocultural anthropology, captivity, escape, uncertainty, waste] RESUMEN Este ensayo revisa artículos producidos en las cuatro revistas científicas claves de la Asociación Americana de Antropología a lo largo de 2018, e identifica las formas como los antropólogos culturales aceptaron la invitación de Haraway para "quedarse con el problema" a través de un envolvimiento con las lógicas de la captividad y sus fallas. Este trabajo sugiere atención continua a temas de larga data en antropología cultural -tensiones entre captura y escape, restricción y resistencia, estructura y agencia-aun cuando sugiere que esa captividad y sus fallas ingobernables pueden productivamente llamar nuestra atención a nuevas formas de pensar sobre gobernanza, temporalidad, escala, afecto, economía política, posthumanismo, ontología, cuidado e infraestructura.En esta revisión, pregunto: ¿Qué puede y qué no puede ser contenido en el momento contemporáneo, y qué está en juego en esa contención o en la filtración que supera sus fronteras? La revisión se enfoca en las formas claves en que los antropólogos analizaron estas cuestiones de larga data de nuevo en 2018: captividad y la naturaleza de lo humano, dependencia y exilio, y violencia y fronteras y, por contraste, cambio desenfrenado e incertidumbre, personas rebeldes y afectos, y residuos filtrantes y toxicidad. En general, sugiero que la captividad y la filtración proveen provocaciones productivas para estudio posterior. [año en revisión, antropología sociocultural, captividad, escape, incertidumbre, residuos]

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Section: Runaway Change: Crisis and Uncertaintymentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Doughty

2019

American Anthropologist

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“…Los abordajes etnográficos han sido destacados como fructíferos para el análisis sociotécnico de algoritmos (KAVANAGH; MCGARRAGHY; KELLY, 2015; KITCHIN, 2017; SEAVER, 2017). Caracterizándose, porque el investigador desde una posición "externa" (outsider) ejecuta un proceso análogo a la ingeniería reversa para entender las elecciones sociotécnicas detrás de los algoritmos (BUCHER, 2016;SEAVER, 2017SEAVER, , 2018, examinando "la lógica que guía las manos, escogiendo ciertos algoritmos en lugar de otros, eligiendo representaciones particulares de datos y traduciendo ideas en código" (SEAVER, 2013, p. 10, Traducción propia) Página | 27 RESULTADOS En el desafío de retratar un fenómeno complejo decidimos presentar el desarrollo del chatbot Katri dividiéndolo en 6 momentos que nos ayudan a sintetizar el flujo de los acontecimientos en unidades de análisis que agrupan un conjunto de actividades y elecciones socio-técnicas (Cuadro 1). Estos 6 momentos que describen el desarrollo del chatbot como un ser vivo que nace, crece y madura, cumplen un objetivo doble: por un lado, son un recurso narrativo para abrir la caja negra haciendo accesible a un público más amplio el proceso de desarrollo de los chatbots; por otro, sintetizan la lógica "que guía las manos" detrás de la creación de los mismos.…”

Section: Metodologíaunclassified

El desarrollo sociotécnico de un chatbot o ¿Cómo se construye una caja negra?

Reina¹,

Vilaça

Spolidorio

et al. 2020

R. Tecnol. Soc.

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“…This is not to say that we risk becoming “slaves to the algorithm” rather than making algorithms work for us. As the emerging anthropology of algorithms shows, algorithmic operations are socio technical processes that are not separate from, nor simply the product of, culturally mediated human actions (Besteman and Gusterson ; Lowry ; Seaver ). The algorithms by which “Google Scholar and Co.” and academic publishers’ databases “know” what to do evolve in tandem with our collective input, including the keywords we use and the terms we search by.…”

Section: Technologies For Making Words Mattermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Anthropologists, however, can choose to disrupt those algorithmic imperatives in creative ways. As Nick Seaver (, 382) notes, “Anthropology's greatest contribution to contemporary critical discourse about algorithms may be the corrosive potential of anthropological attention itself, which promises to break down the apparent solidity and coherence of the algorithm.” Here, I wish to do so by concluding this article with an alternative word cloud based on all those keywords that did not make the tables and word clouds printed above.…”

Section: Conclusion: a Magical Cloudmentioning

confidence: 99%

Keywords and key words in AE

Sastramidjaja

2019

American Ethnologist

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The keywords and titles of articles published in American Ethnologist from 2016 to 2019 show a striking intersection of anthropological scholarship and world‐event trends. Tables and word clouds generated from recurring words expose the centrality of critical events, which appears to support recent contentions about a “crisis‐chasing” mode in anthropology today. But it conceals the multivocality of authors’ engagement with current events, while the idiosyncratic words that fill most of the keyword lists and titles in AE disrupt any generalization about anthropology's primary concerns. Therefore, aggregated key words cannot be taken at face value as signposts of relevance in anthropological scholarship. Yet those isolated words are increasingly influential in an era of digitized publishing, which compels scholars to adapt keywords to algorithmic logics of recognition. [keywords, aggregation, algorithm, relevance, anthropology, American Ethnologist]

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What Should an Anthropology of Algorithms Do?

Cited by 100 publications

References 11 publications

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

El desarrollo sociotécnico de un chatbot o ¿Cómo se construye una caja negra?

Keywords and key words in AE

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