Matthew Fuller and Dominik Schindler – “Communities as vague operators, Algorithms as heuristics: Epistemological Questions for a Critical Network Science”

Virtual presentation: Wednesday, July 6 12:30 PST

Bios: Matthew Fuller is Professor of Cultural Studies. With Usman Haque, he is co-author of ‘Urban Versioning System v1.0’ (ALNY) and with Andrew Goffey, of ‘Evil Media’ (MIT),  Editor of ‘Software Studies, a lexicon’ (MIT) and co-editor of the journal Computational Culture. He is involved in a number of projects in art, media and software and is the author of the forthcoming, ‘How to Sleep, in art, biology and culture’ (Bloomsbury).

Dominik Schinder has studied mathematics and digital media in Heidelberg, Berlin and London. His PhD project in Applied Mathematics at Imperial College London draws from dynamical network analysis and machine learning. Dominik analyses far-right digital countercultures in collaboration with the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin.

Abstract: In this talk, we aim to analyse the nature of what figures in network science as patterns of nodes and edges called ‘communities’. Remaining multi-faceted and vague, we propose to describe the concept of community as a ‘vague operator’ that is similar to Susan Leigh Star’s notion of the boundary object but more loose like a collection of hints. Disentangling different lineages in network science then allows us to contextualise the founding myth of ‘community’ popularised by Michelle Girvan and Mark Newman in 2002. After studying one particular community detection algorithm, the so called ‘Louvain algorithm’, we comment on problems arising with some of their more ambiguous applications. We argue that ‘community’ can act as a real abstraction with the power to reshape social relations such as producing echo chambers in social networking sites. To trouble the epistemological foundations of community detection, we thus imagine a ‘critical heuristics’ that embraces partiality, actual humbleness, reflexivity and artificiality.