The third speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Martina Mahnke, who is approaching algorithms from a human rather than technical perspective. Indeed, the term algorithm is often used to avoid explaining exactly how automated systems function, and what logics them embed; the study of algorithms from the user’s or programmer’s view has a considerably shorter history to date.
From this perspective, the, algorithms are communicative constructs; the narratives of algorithms influence directly how people engage with them. But this also implies that there is the narrative of algorithms that is created by the programmers, as well as a potential …