Algorithms have risen to become one, if not the central technology for producing, circulating, and evaluating knowledge in multiple societal arenas. In this book, scholars from the social sciences, humanities, and computer science argue that this shift has, and will continue to have, profound implications for how knowledge is produced and what and whose knowledge is valued and deemed valid. To attend to this fundamental change, the authors propose the concept of algorithmic regimes and demonstrate how they transform the epistemological, methodological, and political foundations of knowledge production, sensemaking, and decision-making in contemporary societies. Across sixteen chapters, the volume offers a diverse collection of contributions along three perspectives on algorithmic regimes: the methods necessary to research and design algorithmic regimes, the ways in which algorithmic regimes reconfigure sociotechnical interactions, and the politics engrained in algorithmic regimes.

As a cultural form, media practice and organizational model, the anthology has represented an important editorial framework in the development, preservation and retrieval of narratives, from paper-based media to machine-generated content, all throughout a series of discontinued analog and digital technologies. Over time, anthologies became part of the “metaphors we live by” (Lakoff and Johnson 2008), figurative lenses through which we read, navigate, interpret stories and organize human thoughts for better understanding. By providing an overview on the role of the anthology on streaming platform environments, this book examines how traditional editorial practices of anthologization intersect with data-driven content classification and sorting in the context of both pre- and post-digital culture. The author ultimately proposes to insert “anthology” in a vocabulary of digital culture that accounts for new curatorial and algorithmic processes of content filtering, in the attempt to expand the critical “keywords” (Williams 1983; Striphas 2015; Thylstrup et al. 2021) for the study of culture, society, data.

Blockchain is a digital ledger of transactions duplicated and distributed across an entire network of computer systems on the blockchain which makes it more difficult to hack or tamper with. The popularity of blockchain has been increasing with the growth of social media and the internet of things (IoT). Social media are interactive digitally mediated technologies that facilitate the creation or sharing and exchange of information, ideas, opinions and interests via virtual communities and social network platforms. However, unmonitored social accounts can be the target of hackers who post fraudulent messages or virus-infected links that spread to contacts and followers, and "employee weakness" is responsible for 20% of cyberattacks in companies. So, it has become essential to secure both personal and professional social media networks, accounts and data.

“A brilliant travel guide to the coming world of AI.”
—Jeanette Winterson

What does it mean to be creative? Can creativity be trained? Is it uniquely human, or could AI be considered creative?

Mathematical genius and exuberant polymath Marcus du Sautoy plunges us into the world of artificial intelligence and algorithmic learning in this essential guide to the future of creativity. He considers the role of pattern and imitation in the creative process and sets out to investigate the programs and programmers—from Deep Mind and the Flow Machine to Botnik and WHIM—who are seeking to rival or surpass human innovation in gaming, music, art, and language. A thrilling tour of the landscape of invention, The Creativity Code explores the new face of creativity and the mysteries of the human code.

“As machines outsmart us in ever more domains, we can at least comfort ourselves that one area will remain sacrosanct and uncomputable: human creativity. Or can we?…In his fascinating exploration of the nature of creativity, Marcus du Sautoy questions many of those assumptions.”
—Financial Times

“Fascinating…If all the experiences, hopes, dreams, visions, lusts, loves, and hatreds that shape the human imagination amount to nothing more than a ‘code,’ then sooner or later a machine will crack it. Indeed, du Sautoy assembles an eclectic array of evidence to show how that’s happening even now.”
—The Times

This book describes how smart cities can be designed with data at their heart, moving from a broad vision to a consistent city-wide collaborative configuration of activities. The authors present a comprehensive framework of techniques to help decision makers in cities analyse their business strategies, design data infrastructures to support these activities, understand stakeholders' expectations, and translate this analysis into a competitive strategy for creating a smart city data infrastructure. Readers can take advantage of unprecedented insights into how cities and infrastructures function and be ready to overcome complex challenges. The framework presented in this book has guided the design of several urban platforms in the European Union and the design of the City Data Strategy of the Mayor of London, UK.

The Data Journalism Handbook: Towards a Critical Data Practice provides a rich and panoramic introduction to data journalism, combining both critical reflection and practical insight. It offers a diverse collection of perspectives on how data journalism is done around the world and the broader consequences of datafication in the news, serving as both a textbook and a sourcebook for this emerging field. With more than 50 chapters from leading researchers and practitioners of data journalism, it explores the work needed to render technologies and data productive for journalistic purposes. It also gives a "behind the scenes" look at the social lives of data sets, data infrastructures, and data stories in newsrooms, media organizations, start-ups, civil society organizations and beyond. The book includes sections on "doing issues with data," "assembling data," "working with data," "experiencing data," "investigating data, platforms and algorithms," "organizing data journalism," "learning data journalism together" and "situating data journalism."

Today we are witnessing an increased use of data visualization in society. Across domains such as work, education and the news, various forms of graphs, charts and maps are used to explain, convince and tell stories. In an era in which more and more data are produced and circulated digitally, and digital tools make visualization production increasingly accessible, it is important to study the conditions under which such visual texts are generated, disseminated and thought to be of societal benefit. This book is a contribution to the multi-disciplined and multi-faceted conversation concerning the forms, uses and roles of data visualization in society. Do data visualizations do 'good' or 'bad'? Do they promote understanding and engagement, or do they do ideological work, privileging certain views of the world over others? The contributions in the book engage with these core questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives.

The Pyramids on the Giza Plateau represent perhaps the most famous archaeological site in the world, capturing on tomb walls frozen moments from almost every aspect of life in ancient Egypt. This book, by one of the foremost experts on the history of Giza, explores new approaches to “cataloging” the site, highlighting efforts at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Harvard University.

The site experienced its first “golden age” as the burial place of three pharaohs of the Egyptian Old Kingdom (Dynasty 4, ca. 2640–2510 BCE). A second golden age came almost five millennia later, when the first modern excavators applied their newly devised archaeological craft to the Giza Plateau. Now, with the advent of many new technologies in the twenty-first century, the Giza Necropolis is available in two, three, and even four dimensions. Children and specialized scholars alike may study the material culture of this ancient civilization from afar, often with greater access than could be achieved in person. However, these new approaches do raise questions: Does 3-D modeling and animation truly improve scholarly comprehension and interpretation? Can interacting with animations still be called scholarship? Where is the border between academic knowledge and mere entertainment?

Through specific case studies and an in-depth history of this important project, Peter Der Manuelian provides an excellent model for other digital visualization initiatives. He also offers more general philosophical reflection on the nature of visualization in archaeology and speculates about emerging technologies and how they may be useful in the future.

Statistics is more topical than ever. Numerous decisions depend on statistical considerations: just think of the Corona crisis or decisions about approving new drugs or other products. If researchers announce they have proved some fact using statistical tests, can we then always be sure that their claim is correct? How, and more importantly why, does statistics work? What can we expect from statistics and what not? 'Fact or Fluke?' is not a textbook that explains statistical tests to the reader; instead, it discusses what comes before those tests: the philosophy behind the statistics. Should one carry out tests, or are there other ways to look at statistics? Ronald Meester and Klaas Slooten use a variety of examples – from court cases to theoretical physics – to present different views on statistics and provide arguments for what they think is the best point of view. This book is meant for anyone who is in some way concerned with, or interested in, statistical evidence: scientific researchers, students, teachers, mathematicians, philosophers, lawyers, managers, and no doubt many others.

An award-winning math popularizer, who has advised the US Olympic Committee, NFL, and NBA, offers sports fans a new way to understand truly improbable feats in their favorite games.
 
In 2013, NBA point guard Steph Curry wowed crowds when he sunk 11 out of 13 three-pointers for a game total of 54 points—only seven other players, including Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, had scored more in a game at Madison Square Garden. Four years later, the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team won its hundredth straight game, defeating South Carolina 66–55. And in 2010, one forecaster—an octopus named Paul—correctly predicted the outcome of all of Germany’s matches in the FIFA World Cup. These are surprising events—but are they truly improbable?
 
In Get in the Game, mathematician and sports analytics expert Tim Chartier helps us answer that question—condensing complex mathematics down to coin tosses and dice throws to give readers both an introduction to statistics and a new way to enjoy sporting events. With these accessible tools, Chartier leads us through modeling experiments that develop our intuitive sense of the improbable. For example, to see how likely you are to beat Curry’s three-pointer feat, consider his 45.3 percent three-point shooting average in 2012–13. Take a coin and assume heads is making the shot (slightly better than Curry at a fifty percent chance). Can you imagine getting heads eleven out of thirteen times? With engaging exercises and fun, comic book–style illustrations by Ansley Earle, Chartier’s book encourages all readers—including those who have never encountered formal statistics or data simulations, or even heard of sports analytics, but who enjoy watching sports—to get in the game.

Digital technologies have rapidly become integral to communities and societies, bringing both significant benefits and serious concerns. Issues such as misinformation, disinformation, online polarization, discrimination, and widening inequalities have prompted a critical and urgent debate: Can digital societies still be effectively governed? This book brings together insights from various disciplines to address the pressing question: “How can we develop and apply principles of (good) governance in digital societies that are organized democracies?”

Governing the Digital Societypresents a range of governance approaches, focusing on online platforms, artificial intelligence, and the public values that underpin these technologies. The authors position themselves at the forefront of their disciplines, offering perspectives from law, critical data studies, urban studies, science and technology studies, computational linguistics, and the political economy of media. Expert interviews provide additional insights into ongoing efforts to tackle the challenges of governing digital societies. The book demonstrates that governance is not just a technical or legal process but a complex societal one, embedding norms, values, and morality into our institutions and daily lives.

In our current screen-saturated culture, we take in more information through visual means than at any point in history. The computers and smart phones that constantly flood us with images do more than simply convey information. They structure our relationship to information through graphical formats. Learning to interpret how visual forms not only present but produce knowledge, says Johanna Drucker, has become an essential contemporary skill.

Graphesis provides a descriptive critical language for the analysis of graphical knowledge. In an interdisciplinary study fusing digital humanities with media studies and graphic design history, Drucker outlines the principles by which visual formats organize meaningful content. Among the most significant of these formats is the graphical user interface (GUI)—the dominant feature of the screens of nearly all consumer electronic devices. Because so much of our personal and professional lives is mediated through visual interfaces, it is important to start thinking critically about how they shape knowledge, our behavior, and even our identity.

Information graphics bear tell-tale signs of the disciplines in which they originated: statistics, business, and the empirical sciences. Drucker makes the case for studying visuality from a humanistic perspective, exploring how graphic languages can serve fields where qualitative judgments take priority over quantitative statements of fact. Graphesis offers a new epistemology of the ways we process information, embracing the full potential of visual forms and formats of knowledge production.

A comprehensive history of data visualization—its origins, rise, and effects on the ways we think about and solve problems.

With complex information everywhere, graphics have become indispensable to our daily lives. Navigation apps show real-time, interactive traffic data. A color-coded map of exit polls details election balloting down to the county level. Charts communicate stock market trends, government spending, and the dangers of epidemics. A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication tells the story of how graphics left the exclusive confines of scientific research and became ubiquitous. As data visualization spread, it changed the way we think.

Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer take us back to the beginnings of graphic communication in the mid-seventeenth century, when the Dutch cartographer Michael Florent van Langren created the first chart of statistical data, which showed estimates of the distance from Rome to Toledo. By 1786 William Playfair had invented the line graph and bar chart to explain trade imports and exports. In the nineteenth century, the “golden age” of data display, graphics found new uses in tracking disease outbreaks and understanding social issues. Friendly and Wainer make the case that the explosion in graphical communication both reinforced and was advanced by a cognitive revolution: visual thinking. Across disciplines, people realized that information could be conveyed more effectively by visual displays than by words or tables of numbers.

Through stories and illustrations, A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication details the 400-year evolution of an intellectual framework that has become essential to both science and society at large.

The prefix “hyper” refers to multiplicity and abundance. More than a physical space, a hypercity is a real city overlaid with information networks that document the past, catalyze the present, and project future possibilities. Hypercities are always under construction.

Todd Presner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano put digital humanities theory into practice to chart the proliferating cultural records of places around the world. A digital platform transmogrified into a book, it explains the ambitious online project of the same name that maps the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment. The authors examine the media archaeology of Google Earth and the cultural–historical meaning of map projections, and explore recent events—the “Arab Spring” and the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster—through social media mapping that incorporates data visualizations, photographic documents, and Twitter streams. A collaboratively authored and designed work, HyperCities includes a “ghost map” of downtown Los Angeles, polyvocal memory maps of LA’s historic Filipinotown, avatar-based explorations of ancient Rome, and hour-by-hour mappings of the Tehran election protests of 2009.

Not a book about maps in the literal sense, HyperCities describes thick mapping: the humanist project of participating and listening that transforms mapping into an ethical undertaking. Ultimately, the digital humanities do not consist merely of computer-based methods for analyzing information. They are a means of integrating scholarship with the world of lived experience, making sense of the past in the layered spaces of the present for the sake of the open future.

[from the Preface] This introductory textbook in undergraduate probability emphasizes the inseparability between data (computing) and probability (theory) in our time. It examines the motivation, intuition, and implication of the probabilistic tools used in science and engineering:

1. Motivation: In the ocean of mathematical definitions, theorems, and equations, why should we spend our time on this particular topic but not another?
2. Intuition: When going through the deviations, is there a geometric interpretation or physics beyond those equations?
3. Implication: After we have learned a topic, what new problems can we solve?

How will businesses use quantum technology in the future? What problems will a quantum computer solve? How long will it take before these devices become commercially relevant? With the first generation of quantum computers on the horizon, understanding their impact is more relevant than ever. Luckily, you don’t need a physics degree to understand the functionality of these computers – just like you don’t need to know how a transistor works to excel in conventional it. This book is the perfect introduction to the opportunities and threats of quantum technologies. It equips you with the necessary knowledge to join cutting-edge discussions and make strategic decisions.

Because license plate reader (LPR) technology is relatively new in the United States, opportunities and obstacles in its use in law enforcement are still under exploration. To examine issues about this technology, RAND conducted interviews with law enforcement personnel, police officers, and others responsible for procuring, maintaining, and operating the systems.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals initiative has the potential to set the direction for a future world that works for everyone. Approved by 193 United Nations member countries in September 2016 to help guide global and national development policies through the year 2030, the seventeen goals build on the successes of the Millennium Development Goals, but also include new priority areas, such as climate change, economic inequality, innovation, sustainable consumption, peace, and justice. Assessed against commonly agreed targets and indicators, the goals should facilitate inter-governmental cooperation and the development of regional and even global development strategies. This book explores, through a series of case studies, the substantial challenges for assembling reliable data and statistics to address pressing development challenges, particularly in Africa. By highlighting the enormous potential value of creating and using high quality data, statistics, and records as an interconnected resource and describing how this can be achieved, the book will contribute to defining meaningful and realistic global and national development policies in the critical period to 2030.

Neural networks are an exciting technology of growing importance in real industrial situations, particularly in control and systems. This book aims to give a detailed appreciation of the use of neural nets in these applications; it is aimed particularly at those with a control or systems background who wish to gain an insight into the technology in the context of real applications.

As frontier artificial intelligence (AI) models—that is, models that match or exceed the capabilities of the most advanced models at the time of their development—become more capable, protecting them from theft and misuse will become more important. The authors of this report explore what it would take to protect model weights—the learnable parameters that encode the core intelligence of an AI—from theft by a variety of potential attackers.

A vivid, fast-paced inside look at financial markets, the people who work on them, and how technology is changing their world (and ours).
 
Markets are messy, and no one knows this better than traders who work tirelessly to predict what they will do next. In Whoosh Goes the Market, Daniel Scott Souleles takes us into the day-to-day experiences of a team at a large trading firm, revealing what it’s actually like to make and lose money on contemporary capital markets.
 
The traders Souleles shadows have mostly moved out of the pits and now work with automated, glitch-prone computer systems. They remember the days of trading manually, and they are suspicious of algorithmically driven machine-learning systems. Openly musing about their own potential extinction, they spend their time expressing fear and frustration in profanity-laced language. With Souleles as our guide, we learn about everything from betting strategies to inflated valuations, trading swings, and market manipulation. This crash course in contemporary finance vividly reveals the existential anxiety at the evolving front lines of American capitalism.