Toward an analytical and methodological understanding of actor-network theory

Actor-Network theory (ANT) is well developed within social studies of science and technology. The last two decades have seen an increasing awareness and interest in ANT within the social sciences and it has increasingly been invoked to theorise the role of ‘nonhumans’ in social life.  In this respect the conceptual repertoire of ANT has been increasingly drawn upon to examine the relational dimensions between artefacts and people. Despite this the use of ANT as an analytical and/or methodological approach occupies a peripheral within social science research.  In part, the reticence towards ANT may be explained by its lack of theoretical unity. Analytically and methodologically the application of ANT and thought which is closely associated with the approach is considerably varied. ANT informed research often differs quite considerably in terms of methodological approach and style of analyses. This is further complicated by the disparate emphases of ANT proponents and the proliferation of different versions of ANT. Thus, there is no generic way to ‘apply’ actor-network theory and it lacks methodological prescription. This article intends to articulate the analytical and methodological possibilities of ANT. For those who are encountering ANT for the first time or for whom ANT has been regarded as a somewhat left field and inaccessible theory obscured by its own vocabularies and heterogeneity this article may provide a useful conceptual map through which the key elements of ANT can be navigated

Investigating Evaluation Measures in Ant Colony Algorithms for Learning Decision Tree Classifiers

Ant-Tree-Miner is a decision tree induction algorithm that is based on the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) meta- heuristic. Ant-Tree-Miner-M is a recently introduced extension of Ant-Tree-Miner that learns multi-tree classification models. A multi-tree model consists of multiple decision trees, one for each class value, where each class-based decision tree is responsible for discriminating between its class value and all other values present in the class domain (one vs. all). In this paper, we investigate the use of 10 different classification quality evaluation measures in Ant-Tree-Miner-M, which are used for both candidate model evaluation and model pruning. Our experimental results, using 40 popular benchmark datasets, identify several quality functions that substantially improve on the simple Accuracy quality function that was previously used in Ant-Tree-Miner-M

Actors and networks or agents and structures: towards a realist view of information systems

Actor-network theory (ANT) has achieved a measure of popularity in the analysis of information systems. This paper looks at ANT from the perspective of the social realism of Margaret Archer. It argues that the main issue with ANT from a realist perspective is its adoption of a `flat' ontology, particularly with regard to human beings. It explores the value of incorporating concepts from ANT into a social realist approach, but argues that the latter offers a more productive way of approaching information systems