The final speaker in this session at the SEASON 2025 conference is Nora Lindemann, who will focus especially on the role of Large Language Models in the information ecosystem. It’s important to note here that knowledge is embodied and situated, while information is broken-down knowledge that can be transferred through communication. This is also relational, where a relation is a connection between two entities that is constituted by their specific interaction and modulated by power.
Online information access is now rapidly changing, from (intransparently) algorithmically mediated conventional search results to the intrusion of AI-generated summaries into search results pages, or …
The next speakers in this session at the SEASON 2025 conference are Jutta Haider and Malte Rödl, whose interests are in what they call ignorance logics in search, with a particular focus on environmental issues. Algorithmic systems are involved in the shaping of knowledge, and of what is knowable and can be known; and societal responses to ecological crises, in particular, are now failing not so much because of a lack of knowledge but because of the possibility of ignorance. This is due in part also because of the curation of information by algorithmic black boxes.
The first speaker in the first paper session at the SEASON 2025 conference is Frans van der Sluis, whose focus is on information quality in information retrieval. Judging information quality is hard: often, there is an inherent uncertainty around truth, and a question about whether a statement can be reliably justified as true. Practices such as cherry-picking, bothsidesism, and framing exploit such uncertainties. Overall, then, information quality might mean any of accuracy, comprehensiveness, expertise, usefulness, bias, and more.
Search engines tend to objectify such quality, mostly by assessing relevance; Google also seeks to includes expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness factors, though …
After a week spent in Brussels and at the 25th anniversary of the Center for Internet Research in Aarhus, I’ve now arrived in Hamburg for the inaugural Search Engines and Society (SEASON) 2025 conference, which begins with a keynote by the great Matthias Spielkamp, the founder of German NGO AlgorithmWatch, who is also a partner in our ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His keynote reflects on the past ten years of AlgorithmWatch’s efforts to promote algorithmic accountability.
AlgorithmWatch is a non-profit NGO based in Berlin and Zürich, seeking to ensure that algorithms serve to strengthen …
