On “Sourcery,” or Code as Fetish

This essay offers a sympathetic interrogation of the move within new media studies toward “software studies.” Arguing against theoretical conceptions of programming languages as the ultimate performative utterance, it contends that source code is never simply the source of any action; rather, source code is only source code after the fact: its effectiveness depends on a whole imagined network of machines and humans. This does not mean that source code does nothing, but rather that it serves as a kind of fetish, and that the notion of the user as super agent, buttressed by real-time computation, is the obverse, not the opposite of this “sourcery.

Working the Digital Humanities: Uncovering Shadows between the Dark and the Light

The following is an exchange between the two authors in response to a paper given by Chun at the “Dark Side of the Digital Humanities” panel at the 2013 Modern Languages Association (mla) Annual Convention. This panel, designed to provoke controversy and debate, succeeded in doing so. However, in order to create a more rigorous conversation focused on the many issues raised and elided and on the possibilities and limitations of digital humanities as they currently exist, we have produced this collaborative text. Common themes in Rhody’s and Chun’s responses are: the need to frame digital humanities within larger changes to university funding and structure, the importance of engaging with uncertainty and the ways in which digital humanities can elucidate “shadows” in the archive, and the need for and difficulty of creating alliances across diverse disciplines.  We hope that this text provokes more ruminations on the future of the university (rather than simply on the humanities) and leads to more wary, creative, and fruitful engagements with digital technologies that are increasingly shaping the ways and means by which we think.&nbsp

Pattern Discrimination

Algorithmic identity politics reinstate old forms of social segregation - in a digital world, identity politics is pattern discrimination. It is by recognizing patterns in input data that Artificial Intelligence algorithms create bias and practice racial exclusions thereby inscribing power relations into media. How can we filter information out of data without reinserting racist, sexist, and classist beliefs

Living In/difference; or, How to Imagine Ambivalent Networks

In a 1954 essay Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton coined the term homophily to describe similarity-based friendship. They based their findings on friendship patterns among neighbors in a biracial housing project in the United States, using a combined quantitative and qualitative, empirical and speculative analysis of social processes. Since then homophily has become a guiding principle for network science: it is simply presumed that similarity breeds connection. But the unpublished study by Merton, Patricia S. West, and Marie Jahoda, which grounds Lazarsfeld and Merton’s analysis, and the Merton and Bureau of Applied Social Research’s archive reveal a more complex picture. This article engages with the data traces in the archive to reimagine what enabled the residents of the studied housing project to live in difference, as neighbors. The reanimation of this archive reveals the often counterintuitive characteristic of our imagined networks: they are about removal, not addition. It also opens up new imagined possibilities for a digital future beyond the hatred of the different and online echo chambers

Protecting Expert Advice for the Public: Promoting Safety and Improved Communications

The drivers of the harassment and intimidation of researchers are complex, widespread, and global in their reach and were being studied across many disciplines even before COVID-19. This policy briefing reviews some of the scholarship on this wide-ranging problem but focuses on what can be done to help ensure that Canadians fully benefit from the work of Canada’s researchers while also preserving the security and safety of those researchers. It identifies policies and actions that can be implemented in the near term to gather information on the problem, better frame public research communications, and ensure that mechanisms are readily available to support researchers who are threatened. The policy briefing is concerned with researchers, but these behaviours are also harming journalists, politicians, public health communicators, and many others more fully in the public eye than researchers. Some recommendations here may help to address this wider problem