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Online Workshop: Source Code Criticism: Hermeneutics, Philology, and Didactics of Algorithms

source code

The workshop “Source Code Criticism: Hermeneutics, Philology, and Didactics of Algorithms” (March 25/26) examines the various ways in which code can be read, interpreted, and made accessible to current and future readers.

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