The Constitution of Algorithms

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.Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
I Ground-Truthing 27
1 Studying Computer Scientists 31
2 A First Case Study 51
II Programming 87
3 Von Neumann's Draft, Electronic Brains, and Cognition 93
4 A Second Case Study 135
III Formulating 197
5 Mathematics as a Science 203
6 A Third Case Study 237
Conclusion 283
Glosary 291
Notes 299
References 325
Index 365“By marrying ethnography and hands-on practice of ground-truthing, programming, and formulating, Jaton discovers all the small but important details and practices that go into creating algorithms.” —TechTalks“A provocative and skillful study of how algorithms come into the world—and inevitably shape it. Jaton performs the daring feat of offering an empirically rich analysis of algorithms without taking them for granted.”
—Malte Ziewitz, Cornell University

“This is a remarkable study of the spaces where algorithms are made: at once an ethnographic and theoretical intervention, illuminating the birthplaces of algorithmic systems and the collective processes that shape them.” 
—Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI
 Florian Jaton is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the STS Lab at the University of Lausanne.