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Illuminates how algorithms, intertwined with human biases, damage political discourse and civic engagement.

Algorithmic Worldmaking is an urgent exploration of the dynamic relationship between algorithms that encode their human creators’ assumptions and the humans whose choices are shaped by these algorithms in search engines, social media, and other digital spaces. Transcending discussions of one or the other, Jeremy David Johnson traces the corrupting political and social influences that arise from their mutual interaction.

Johnson uses the concept of kosmos in its sense of a dynamic order to frame the interplay between algorithms, humans, and their environments. He first shows how algorithms, far from being objective or unbiased, perpetuate human errors. Johnson then suggests a framework of four parts—navigation, exploration, maintenance, and monetization—to map the variety of political consequences to a society influenced by these four factors.

Citing controversies at major platforms such as Google, YouTube, and Facebook, Johnson demonstrates how algorithms limit and shape human thought. He makes several persuasive arguments. First, algorithms and humans share agency but humans have exceptional responsibility. Second, the algorithmic kosmos mirrors and shapes social oppression. Third, algorithms incentivize capitalist exploitation. Last, these influences damage democratic deliberation.

This landmark study is essential for scholars and students of political science, media studies, and those interested in the perilous implications of algorithmic systems on civic and political life.

In the ever-evolving landscape of engineering education, calculus stands as a foundational pillar, yet its teaching methods have remained largely unchanged for decades. This textbook is born out of a deep-seated need for reform. Traditional calculus courses struggle to incorporate relevant, real-world examples. The disconnect between mathematical theory and its real-world uses hinders the learning process and fails to fully engage students in the practical applications of calculus. A second core issue lies not in the examples used but in the selection of material and the overemphasis on lengthy, manual calculations that lack meaningful context. This book represents a radical departure from conventional approaches, inspired by Prof. Grizzle’s experience developing and teaching the first-semester course ROB 101 Computational Linear Algebra. Its goal is to breathe life into mathematics through programming and realistic examples. It begins by placing integration at the beginning of the learning process, starting with sums and progressing to integration, which is not only more intuitive but also lends itself well to programming applications, such as calculating the change in position of mobile robots from velocity curves. Following integration, the book delves into differentiation (both single-variable and multivariable) and its myriad applications. Traditional methods of computing integrals, such as antiderivatives and substitution methods, are then introduced and framed within the context of both manual calculations and modern symbolic tools. The journey continues through improper integrals, ordinary differential equations (ODEs), Laplace Transforms, and Feedback Control, encompassing a breadth of topics rarely seen in a single calculus course.  

Digital technology and the Internet have revolutionized film criticism, programming, and preservation in deeply paradoxical ways. The Internet allows almost everyone to participate in critical discourse, but many print publications and salaried positions for professional film critics have been eliminated. Digital technologies have broadened access to filmmaking capabilities, as well as making thousands of older films available on DVD and electronically. At the same time, however, fewer older films can be viewed in their original celluloid format, and newer, digitally produced films that have no “material” prototype are threatened by ever-changing servers that render them obsolete and inaccessible.

Cineaste, one of the oldest and most influential publications focusing on film, has investigated these trends through a series of symposia with the top film critics, programmers, and preservationists in the United States and beyond. This volume compiles several of these symposia: “Film Criticism in America Today” (2000), “International Film Criticism Today” (2005), “Film Criticism in the Age of the Internet” (2008), “Film Criticism: The Next Generation” (2013), “The Art of Repertory Film Exhibition and Digital Age Challenges” (2010), and “Film Preservation in the Digital Age” (2011). It also includes interviews with the late, celebrated New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael and the critic John Bloom (“Joe Bob Briggs”), as well as interviews with the programmers/curators Peter von Bagh and Mark Cousins and with the film preservationist George Feltenstein. This authoritative collection of primary-source documents will be essential reading for scholars, students, and film enthusiasts.

The modern era of digital communication dates to Claude Shannon’s three seminal papers appearing in 1948 and 1949 in the Bell System Technical Journal. Digital communication advanced rapidly in the following years and generated a large number of technologies, including cell phones, Wi-Fi, fiber optic communication, MP3 players, JPEG-encoded photographs, high-definition television (HDTV), etc. With increasing demands for remote and high-speed digital access to data and real-time video, advances are likely to continue for the foreseeable future. The topics covered in this book constitute a “first course” on digital communication because with a few exceptions, primarily related to the multipath propagation effects and fading, only the point-to-point additive white Gaussian noise channel is considered. This was one of the first channels to be seriously studied in the modern era of digital communication that began with Shannon. From a practical perspective, modulation and coding for the deep-space channel motivated much of the early work in this field. The material covered in this textbook is still widely used and forms the basis for subsequent and ongoing advancements in the field. Broadly speaking, the fundamentals covered in this textbook are the notion of information, entropy, lossless data compression, error-correcting methods in the presence of noise, the fundamental limits of reliable communication, channel capacity, optimum decision theory and optimum receiver principals, common modulation types, the relationship between bandwidth and dimensionality, system performance using modulation and coding, and the fundamental trade-off between energy-efficiency and bandwidth-efficiency.  

Uncovering race, gender, and sexual biases in popular self-publishing platforms

The average reader need not go far in a bookstore before, knowingly or not, they encounter authors who started their careers by self-publishing prior to achieving commercial success. Examples include Margaret Atwood, Andy Weir, Colleen Hoover, Anna Todd, E. L. James, Scarlett St. Clair, and many more. Such stories of self-made writers are compelling and seem more attainable to others with the accessibility of modern publishing platforms such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Wattpad, Webtoon, Radish, Inkitt, Qidian, Tapas, and Swoon Reads. However, as Claire Parnell uncovers in her examination of the two most popular—Amazon and Wattpad—these services in fact perpetuate systemic racial, gender, and sexual bias against authors of color and queer authors through their technological, economic, social, and cultural structures.

At a time when there is a real reckoning with the discrimination that has resulted in publishing opportunities for only relatively few privileged authors—who are often White, upper class, and male—self-publishing presents itself as an equalizer of sorts. Exploring that idea, Parnell shows that these platforms are not just intermediaries for information; they structure content and users in multiple, often inequitable, ways through their ability to set market conditions and apply algorithmic sorting. Combining original interviews, walkthrough method, metadata analysis, and more, Parnell finds that self-publishing platforms reproduce challenges for authors from marginalized communities. Far from equalizing the market, the new platforms instead frequently perpetuate the stubborn barriers to mainstream success for BIPOC and queer authors.

A wide-ranging history of the algorithm.

Bringing together the histories of mathematics, computer science, and linguistic thought, Language and the Rise of the Algorithm reveals how recent developments in artificial intelligence are reopening an issue that troubled mathematicians well before the computer age: How do you draw the line between computational rules and the complexities of making systems comprehensible to people? By attending to this question, we come to see that the modern idea of the algorithm is implicated in a long history of attempts to maintain a disciplinary boundary separating technical knowledge from the languages people speak day to day.
 
Here, Jeffrey M. Binder offers a compelling tour of four visions of universal computation that addressed this issue in very different ways: G. W. Leibniz’s calculus ratiocinator; a universal algebra scheme Nicolas de Condorcet designed during the French Revolution; George Boole’s nineteenth-century logic system; and the early programming language ALGOL, short for algorithmic language. These episodes show that symbolic computation has repeatedly become entangled in debates about the nature of communication. Machine learning, in its increasing dependence on words, erodes the line between technical and everyday language, revealing the urgent stakes underlying this boundary.
 
The idea of the algorithm is a levee holding back the social complexity of language, and it is about to break. This book is about the flood that inspired its construction.