Inspired by recent postings by Tarleton Gillespie and C.W. Anderson, I wanted to chime in with my own take on the material and political aspects of algorithms. I’ve been mulling this over in my work with sensor enthusiasts, both in the Quantified Self movement and in open data communities like Cosm (formerly Pachube). This is […]
Kevin Driscoll published a paper exploring some of the key events in the history of databases in society. Here’s the abstract: Since the diffusion of the punched card tabulator following the 1890 U.S. Census, mass-scale information processing has been alternately a site of opportunity, ambivalence and fear in the American imagination. While large bureaucracies have […]