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Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 138. Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London Hosted by King's Digital Lab www.dhhumanist.org Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org Date: 2019-07-13 16:15:29+00:00 From: Willard McCartySubject: discovery vs delivery The previous note, concerning a webinar on "biases in algorithms", leads me to the question of how they got there. I'm not thinking so much of design and encoding, rather our inclination to pay far more attention to that which algorithms 'deliver' than to what we discover by working with them at the level at which they are comprehensible. We are, I suppose, preconditioned to 'delivery' by the frequent (and, to me, unconscionable) use of this word in the discourse of education and that also of public service and politics, e.g. the 'delivery' of Brexit in the UK. It's the supermarket-talk, of trollies and packages, even more so of deliveries to the door, of things to be accepted consumed rather than examined critically. I recall the now old grumbling of those advocating user-hostile interfaces. A bit over the top, no? I too want my machine and its apps simply to work. But how do we design for real engagement with tools? And how do we encourage the inclination to examine what we get from our machines critically and to dig in like the potter into clay? Yours, WM -- Willard McCarty (www.mccarty.org.uk/), Professor emeritus, Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London; Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (www.tandfonline.com/loi/yisr20) and Humanist (www.dhhumanist.org) _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/ Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php
Editor: Willard McCarty (King's College London, U.K.; Western Sydney University, Australia)
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