[Petit Fours #420] On algorithmic workflows, global governance, and members' perspectives
Hi, everyone! Everything feels like a lot right now, but, focusing on the good, here’s what I’ve got for you today:
#1 Riyaj Shaikh’s dissertation The Work Practice of Platform-Mediated Food Delivery: An Ethnographic Study of Bridging Algorithmic Workflows and Situated Action is now available online (pdf). Not long now until the public defence!
#2 I spent most of last week at the WASP-HS winter conference. This gathering of social science and humanities scholars in Sweden was a good opportunity to hear about research I would not usually hear about, like this project on The Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence. If you are curious, you can read about many more WASP-HS projects on the website of the program.
#3 As one highlight of the conference for me, Hannah Pelikan and I managed to sneak a bit of time to work together. If you are not familiar with her work, here’s one quick yet rewarding read on studying human–robot interaction: Whose Perspective are We Studying in Ethnographic HRI? “The perspective of the members’ is key in an ethnomethodological analysis. When studying human-robot interaction, it may not always be clear whose perspective one is studying: that of the user or that of the designer. We reflect on how we struggled to balance both perspectives in our recent video-ethnographic study of delivery robots and discuss how both perspectives can be combined without loosing analytic rigor. We highlight particularly how ethnographic HRI could learn from prior discussion of similar challenges in Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.”
#4 Final reminder: the paper deadline for the Aarhus decennial conference is not much more than a week away (Feb 20)!
-A