Algorithms, once obscure objects of technical art, have lately been subject to considerable popular and scholarly scrutiny. What does it mean to adopt the algorithm as an object of analytic attention? What is in view, and out of view, when we focus on the algorithm? Using Niklaus Wirth's 1975 formulation that “algorithms + data structures = programs” as a launching-off point, this paper examines how an algorithmic lens shapes the way in which we might inquire into contemporary digital culture.

One of the issues with which bioethics is concerned is defining the limits of the organism’s transformations by technology in order for humanity to avoid evil. Kant’s teleological power of judgment enables us to identify an organism and it allows nature to be transformed only insofar as it affirms a moral subject acting on the basis of autonomy as reason. I propose a new way of utilizing Kantian philosophy in bioethical knowledge. I ask: can we make judgments about nature via (...) the principle of purposiveness? In answering this question, I clarify the following points. The first is Kant’s research into the foundations and reasons for using the teleological power of judgment. The second is the role of digital technology and how it complicates the use of the teleological power of judgment within the framework of bioethical knowledge. And the third is the preservation of the foundations for using the teleological power of judgment. (shrink)

How do the organization and presentation of large-scale social media images recondition the process by which visual knowledge, value, and meaning are made in contemporary conditions? Analyzing fundamental elements in the changing syntax of existing visual software ontology—the ways current social media platforms and aggregators organize and categorize social media images—this article relates how visual materials created within social media platforms manifest distinct modes of knowledge production and acquisition. First, I analyze the structure of social media images within data streams (...) as opposed to previous information organization in a structured database. While the database has no pre-defined notions of time and thus challenges traditional linear forms, the data stream re-emphasizes the linearity of a particular data sequence and activates a set of new relations to contemporary temporalities. Next, I show how these visual arrangements and temporal principles are manifested and discussed in three artworks: “Untitled” by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, The Clock by Christian Marclay, and Last Clock by Jussi Ängeslevä and Ross Cooper. By emphasizing the technical and poetic ways in which social media situate the present as a “thick” historical unit that embodies multiple and synchronous temporalities, this article illuminates some of the conditions, challenges, and tensions between former visual structures and current ones, and unfolds the cultural significations of contemporary big visual data. (shrink)

We address some of the epistemological challenges highlighted by the Critical Data Studies literature by reference to some of the key debates in the philosophy of science concerning computational modeling and simulation. We provide a brief overview of these debates focusing particularly on what Paul Humphreys calls epistemic opacity. We argue that debates in Critical Data Studies and philosophy of science have neglected the problem of error management and error detection. This is an especially important feature of the epistemology of (...) Big Data. In “Error” section we explain the main characteristics of error detection and correction along with the relationship between error and path complexity in software. In this section we provide an overview of conventional statistical methods for error detection and review their limitations when faced with the high degree of conditionality inherent to modern software systems. (shrink)

This paper explores the specific questions raised for social epistemology encountered in code and software. It does so because these technologies increasingly make up an important part of our urban environment, and stretch across all aspects of our lives. The paper introduces and explores the way in which code and software become the conditions of possibility for human knowledge, crucially becoming computational epistemes, which we share with non-human but crucially knowledge-producing actors. As such, we need to take account of this (...) new computational world and think about how we live today in a highly mediated code-based world. Nonetheless, here I want to understand software epistemes as a broad concept related to the knowledge generated by both human and non-human actors. The aim is to explore changes that are made possible by the installation of code/software via computational devices, streams, clouds or networks. This is what Mitcham calls a ?new ecology of artifice?. By exploring two case studies, the paper attempts to materialise the practice of software epistemologies through a detailed analysis. This analysis is then drawn together with a notion of compactants to explore how studying tracking software and streams is a useful means of uncovering the agency of software and code for producing these new knowledges. (shrink)

With an estimated one billion smartphones producing over 5 petabytes of data a day, the spatially aware mobile device has become a near ubiquitous presence in daily life. Cogent, excellent research in a variety of fields has explored what the spatial data these devices produce can reveal of society, such as analysis of Foursquare check-ins to reveal patterns of mobility for groups through a city. In such studies, the individual intentions, motivations, and desires behind the production of said data can (...) become lost through computational aggregation and analysis. In this commentary, I argue for a rethinking of the epistemological leap from individual to data point through a seating of the reflexive, self-eliciting subject as an object for spatial big data research. To do so, I first situate current research on spatial big data within a computational turn in social sciences that relies overly on the data produced as a stand-in for the subject producing said data. Second, I argue that a recent shift within geography and cognate disciplines toward viewing spatial big data as a form of spatial media allows for study of the sociotechnical processes that produce modern assemblages of data and society. As spatial media, the spatial big data created through mobile device use can be understood as the data of everyday life and as part of the sociotechnical processes that produce individuals, data, and space. Ultimately, to understand the data of everyday life, researchers must write thick descriptions of the stories we tell ourselves about the data we give off to others. (shrink)

Recent literature on Islam and the digital covers a wide range of topics and themes; however, what is yet to be developed from an Islamic perspective is a broader philosophical framework that accounts for the nature, exigencies and affordances of contemporary digital technologies. In advance of such a framework, this article is an attempt to open the way to philosophical engagement with issues of digital ethics from an Islamic perspective. After a brief review of recent literature on Islam and the (...) digital and a significantly earlier work by Ziauddin Sardar, in which he proposed an information strategy for the Muslim world, this paper provides some background to Islamic ethics and the wide field of ethical theories in the Islamic tradition. This paper then proceeds by identifying and outlining examples of contemporary themes in Islam and the digital which conceal underlying philosophical and theological issues. Finally, this paper considers the significant scale and scope of the transformations involved in the ongoing transposition to the ‘onlife’ and highlights several areas where Islamic perspectives may be seen to converge or diverge with other strands of scholarship on digital ethics. (shrink)