Historische Massenmedien-Wirkungsforschung
Material: R. Burkart: Kommunikationswissenschaft. Grundlagen und Problemfelder. Umrisse einer interdisziplinären Sozialwissenschaft. S. 186-197 & S. 215-236, Stuttgart 2002.
Challenges when Studying Algorithms
This is part two of the mini-series on “studying algorithms”. If you are curious why studying these might be important at all, check out the previous post.
So, what complicates things, is that unearthing the biases within algorithms isn’t a trivial feat – several issues can make it hard to understand what’s going on.
Methods for Studying Algorithms
At last, this is the third part of the mini-series on “studying algorithms”. The previous try to explain why doing so is important and the difficulties you might encounter while doing so.
So, now let’s get to the actual “Hows”. The following sections are high-level overviews over some methods that are out there. They should help you with deciding which to dive deeper into when studying algorithms.
Why Study Algorithms
Last semester I’ve participated in a seminar on “Critical Algorithm Studies”. Collectively we worked through a reading list, which is a filtered version of [the one published by the socialmediacollective]( (https://socialmediacollective.org/reading-lists/critical-algorithm-studies/). In particular, I dived deeper into the sub-list on “Methods for Studying Algorithmic Systems”.
The three posts of this mini-series are an attempt at summarizing those writings and a few others; you can find a complete list of the references at the bottom. :) The series should give you a basic overview over the whys (part 1) and challenges (part 2) of studying algorithms as well as some methods to do so (part 3).
Anyway, enough preface, let’s get started. :)