Source Code Criticism: Hermeneutics, Philology, and Didactics of Algorithms (Online)
University of Basel, Online Workshop March 25/26, 2022
Algorithms determine our situation. From bubble sort to Google’s Page Rank, credit scores, and predictive policing, the logic of algorithms intervenes at every step in our lives. Some operate opaquely, shielding their inner workings from curious eyes. Others strive to be transparent, are shared on repositories like GitHub, and follow an ethics of open-source accountability. In both cases, however, a more than trivial effort is required to understand the source codes in which algorithms are usually written. And with machine learning in the form of artificial neural networks, these efforts may well be in vain, as there is no code to inspect any longer.
The workshop “Source Code Criticism: Hermeneutics, Philology, and Didactics of Algorithms” examines the various ways in which code – both sequential and connectionist – can be read, interpreted, and made accessible to current and future readers, and investigates its role both as often impenetrable societal force as well as a very particular type of text.
For the Zoom link, please send an email to: hannes.bajohr@unibas.ch.
Schedule (all times UTC +1):
March 25
12:00 Markus Krajewski / Hannes Bajohr (Basel): Introduction
12:30 Dan Verständig (Magdeburg): Coding and Uncertain Certainty
13:15 Short Break
13:30 Sarah Lang / Sebastian Stoff (Graz): Expectation Management: Testability and Replicability in the context of research software development
14:15 Lunch Break
15:45 Christoph Engemann (Berlin): Sources of Centrality: The Social Genealogy of Modern Graph Algorithms
16:30 Short Break
16:45 Wiebke Vorrath (Hamburg): Reading Code Poetry: On Meaning-Making Potentials of Source Code as Literary Text
17:30 Short Break
17:45 Mark Marino (Los Angeles): First Findings: 15 Years of Critical Code Studies
18:30 End of Day One
March 26
13:00 Anne Kaun (Stockholm): On robot colleagues and software stories: Cultural Techniques of Knowing and Unknowing the Algorithm
13:45 Short Break
14:00 Leah Henrickson (Leeds): Grieving via GPT: Circling Around Cadaverous Chatbots
14:45 Short Break
15:00 Jonathan Roberge / Tom Lebrun (Québec): BERT, GPT-3, Timnit Gebru, and us: The AI Conquest of Language.
15:45 Longer Break
16:15 Tyler Shoemaker (Davis, CA): Preprocessing the Word
17:00 Short Break
17:15 Matthew Kirschenbaum (College Park, MD): Reading Recurrent Neural Networks
18:00 Final discussion
18:45 End of Day two