[Air-L] Florian Jaton's book

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Today on the CaMP anthropology blog, Florian Jaton discusses his book, The
Constitution of Algorithms.

https://campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

A laboratory study that investigates how algorithms come into existence.

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 book, Florian Jaton 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. Tracing
what he terms a set of intertwining courses of actions sharing common
finalities, he describes the practical activity of creating algorithms
through the lenses of *ground-truthing*, *programming*, and *formulating*.
He first presents the building of ground truths, referential repositories
that form the material basis for algorithms. Then, after considering
programming's resistance to ethnographic scrutiny, he describes programming
courses of action he attended at the laboratory. Finally, he offers an
account of courses of action that successfully formulated some of the
relationships among the data of a ground-truth database, revealing the
links between ground-truthing, programming, and formulating
activities—entangled processes that lead to the shaping of algorithms. In
practice, ground-truthing, programming, and formulating form a whirlwind
process, an emergent and intertwined agency.