A conference co-organized by Malmö University Data Society research program & the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin. Funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences and the above organizing institutions.
Objective
Data and algorithms are on the agenda today. Examples are abundant: How Facebook manually controls the algorithms by tweaking them, the debate whether Amazon is homophobic, whether Google is racist, or the scandal over Microsoft’s chat program Tay that quickly turned to obscene and inflammatory language after having interacted with Twitter users. Studies have also found gender biases as a consequence of image search algorithms and that black people are not recognized as humans in face-recognition algorithms. And then we have the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal and the debate on how data and algorithms can be used to manipulate elections.
There is much need for a socio-cultural approach to research on data and algorithms, by focusing on the actors and their culture(s) behind these technologies. Engineered by humans, data and algorithms embody rules, ideals and imaginations. They are encoded with human intentions that may or may not be fulfilled. Studying humans, logics and culture behind data and algorithms is therefore pivotal if we intend to have an informed discussion of power, and shifting relations of power, in contemporary data society. Here we draw upon the argument that algorithms should be understood as massive and networked, sometimes with hundreds of hands reaching into them, tuning, tweaking and experimenting with them. Still, computer programmers, software engineers and their circumstances have largely been ignored in empirical studies. In this conference we therefore aim to gather researchers exploring questions such as what logic, or combination of logics, informs the practices of designing and programming algorithms. And how the data that these algorithms base their calculation, is constructed?
(Text sourced from cfp)