Software has become a key component of contemporary life and algorithms that rank, classify, or recommend are everywhere. Building on the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon and the cultural techniques tradition, this book examines the constructive and cumulative character of software and retraces the historical trajectories of a series of algorithmic techniques that have become the building blocks for contemporary practices of ordering. Developed in opposition to centuries of library tradition...

A framework for the theory and practice of organizing that integrates the concepts and methods of information organization and information retrieval.Organizing is such a common activity that we often do it without thinking much about it. In our daily lives we organize physical things—books on shelves, cutlery in kitchen drawers—and digital things—Web pages, MP3 files, scientific datasets. Millions of people create and browse Web sites, blog, tag, tweet, and upload ...

Algorithms for Automating Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) presents information on the gathering of information and extraction of actionable intelligence from openly available sources, including news broadcasts, public repositories, and more recently, social media. As OSINT has applications in crime fighting, state-based intelligence, and social research, this book provides recent advances in text mining, web crawling, and other algorithms that have led to advances in methods that can larg...

Computer science as an engineering discipline has been spectacularly successful. Yet it is also a philosophical enterprise in the way it represents the world and creates and manipulates models of reality, people, and action. In this book, Paul Dourish addresses the philosophical bases of human-computer interaction. He looks at how what he calls "embodied interaction"—an approach to interacting with software systems that emphasizes skilled, engaged practice rather than disembodied rationali...

Advocates of computers make sweeping claims for their inherently transformative power: new and different from previous technologies, they are sure to resolve many of our existing social problems, and perhaps even to cause a positive political revolution.In The Cultural Logic of Computation, David Golumbia, who worked as a software designer for more than ten years, confronts this orthodoxy, arguing instead that computers are cultural “all the way down”—that there is no part...

A short, informal account of our ever-increasing dependence on a complex multiplicity of messages, records, documents, and data.We live in an information society, or so we are often told. But what does that mean? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise, informal account of the ways in which information and society are related and of our ever-increasing dependence on a complex multiplicity of messages, records, documents, and data. U...

Information and its management is central to modern society. Organizations – private and public, national and international – have recognized that information is a key resource and that its management is critical for success.Existing books on information management focus on the abilities of computers to process data, the development of information systems, and the management of IT resources. They often start with the computer as a key issue. Although Information Management...

About the necessity and usefulness of developing a philosophy specific to the blockchain technology, emphasizing on the ontological aspects. After an Introduction that highlights the main philosophical directions for this emerging technology, in Blockchain Technology I explain the way the blockchain works, discussing ontological development directions of this technology in Designing and Modeling. The next section is dedicated to the main application of blockchain technology, Bitcoin, with ...

As the twenty-first century unfolds, computers challenge the way in which we think about culture, society and what it is to be human: areas traditionally explored by the humanities.In a world of automation, Big Data, algorithms, Google searches, digital archives, real-time streams and social networks, our use of culture has been changing dramatically. The digital humanities give us powerful theories, methods and tools for exploring new ways of being in a digital age. Berry and Fage...

This Critical Theory and Contemporary Society volume offers an original analysis of the role of the digital in today's society. It rearticulates critical theory by engaging it with the challenges of the digital revolution to show how the digital is changing the ways in which we lead our politics, societies, economies, media, and even private lives. In particular, the work examines how the enlightenment values embedded within the culture and materiality of digital technology can be used to ...

In this innovative book, Celia Lury argues that the time has come for us to explore the world not only with new methods, but with a new approach to methodology itself. Fundamental changes are taking place in how we produce knowledge, how we communicate it and, indeed, what we consider to be knowledge. These changes demand innovative and creative responses to research questions.Lury's rethinking of the nature of social inquiry starts by reconceptualizing the 'problem space'. Problem...

How data and artificial intelligence create a new, abstract digital subjectIdeal Subjects examines how samples of our lives and daily behaviors have come to reside in the world of data and artificial intelligence—and what this means for who we are and what we may become. Detailing how AI-facilitated algorithmic prediction and data modeling make “ideal subjects” of us, Olga Goriunova explores the complex ways we relate to these digital abstractions....