The Constitution of Algorithms: Ground-Truthing, Programming, Formulating

Algorithms - often associated with the terms big data, machine learning, or artificial intelligence - underlie the technologies we use every day, and disputes over the consequences, actual or potential, of new algorithms arise regularly.

In this open access book, the author offers a new way to study computerized methods, providing an account of where algorithms come from and how they are constituted, investigating the practical activities by which algorithms are progressively assembled rather than what they may suggest or require once they are assembled.

Drawing on a four-year ethnographic study of a computer science laboratory that specialized in digital image processing, Jaton illuminates the invisible processes that are behind the development of algorithms.

A provocative and skillful study of how algorithms come into the world—and inevitably shape it. Jaton performs the daring feat of offering an empirically rich analysis of algorithms without taking them for granted.