Associate Professor of Media, Data & Society
My article “The Algorithmization of the Hyperlink” has just been published in the third issue of Computational Culture: a journal of software studies. Abstract This study looks at the history of the hyperlink from a medium-specific perspective by analyzing the technical reconfiguration of the hyperlink by engines and platforms over time. Hyperlinks may be seen… Read more The Algorithmization of the Hyperlink
In “The Like economy: Social buttons and the data-intensive web,” colleague Carolin Gerlitz and I looked into the way Facebook uses the technical infrastructure of social buttons to create a data-intensive web. In this study we aimed to go beyond the interface level by analyzing the infrastructure of the Facebook Platform (API) itself. Recently, Mél… Read more The Materiality of Facebook and Localizing the Cloud
On Saturday, May 4th I attended the ‘The Work of Algorithms’ panel where Nick Seaver talked about Knowing Algorithms. In his talk Seaver discusses the issue of dealing with proprietary algorithms within research and how a focus on this proprietary or ‘black box’ aspect has skewed our criticisms of algorithms. Strands of research dealing with proprietary algorithms, such as… Read more Notes from #MIT8: ‘The Work of Algorithms’ – Knowing Algorithms
On Saturday, May 4th I attended the ‘Labor and Technologies of Surveillance’ panel where Kelly Gates talked about ‘Professionalizing Police Media Work: Surveillance Video & the Forensic Sensibility.’ Gates, who has gone through an extensive training program in the field of video forensics as part of her research, discussed how raw video is not evidence despite video’s aesthetics of… Read more Notes from #MIT8: ‘Labor and Technologies of Surveillance’ – The Aesthetics of Objectivity and Computational Objectivity
On Friday, May 3rd I attended the ‘Social Media Platforms between Private, Public and Commercial Space’ panel where Tarleton Gillespie talked about Curation by Algorithm. Based on his chapter ‘The Relevance of Algorithms’ [pdf] in the forthcoming book Media Technologies Gillespie posed a few questions: 1. What do these algorithms do? Algorithms are part of the broader ‘content moderation’ picture… Read more Notes from #MIT8: ‘Social Media Platforms between Private, Public and Commercial Space’ – Curation by Algorithm
While I was updating my DevonThink today I visited their blog Devonian Times and noticed I missed one of the best April Fools’ jokes related to my research: CareTaker for Facebook is here! Some people say that our apps are not “social†enough now with Facebook and Twitter being still the main trends in the industry.… Read more On algorithmic friendship, a belated April Fools’ joke