The Valente Center for Arts and Sciences welcomes Dr. Tarleton Gillespie, Dept. of Communication, Cornell University; Visiting Researcher, Microsoft Research New England.

Algorithms may now be our most important knowledge technologies, “the scientific instruments of a society at large,” (Gitelman) and they are increasingly vital to how we organize human social interaction, produce authoritative knowledge, and choreograph our participation in public life. Search engines, recommendation systems, edge algorithms on social networking sites, and “trend” identification algorithms: these not only help us find information, they provide a means to know what there is to know and to participate in social and political discourse. The algorithmic assessment of information, then, represents a particular knowledge logic, one built on specific presumptions about what knowledge is and how one should identify the most relevant of it.

In this talk Gillespie will highlight and explore one particular dimension of these public relevance algorithms that has political valence: curation by algorithm. As part of the larger project of overseeing what appears online and what should be removed, social media platforms have increasingly experimented with designing their algorithms so as to curate: the very mechanism for delivering content in response to your query may also be used to hold back what might offend you. Understanding the calculations and motivations behind this algorithmic moderation helps highlight how these algorithms are relevant to our collective efforts to know and be known.

Tarleton Gillespie is an associate professor at Cornell University, in the Department of Communication and the Department of Information Science. This semester he is a visiting researcher with Microsoft Research, New England. He is the co-editor of Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (2014), the author of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (2007), and the co-founder of the scholarly blog at culturedigitally.org.