Nick Seaver and I have put together a list we wanted to share. It is an attempt to collect and categorize a growing critical literature on algorithms as social concerns. The work spans sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, geography, communication, media studies, and legal studies, among others. Our aim was to catalog the emergence of “algorithms” as objects of interest for disciplines beyond mathematics, computer science, and software engineering.

This area is growing in size and popularity so quickly that new contributions are often popping up without reference to work from disciplinary neighbors. One aim of this list is to help nascent scholars of algorithms to identify broader conversations across disciplines, and to avoid reinventing the wheel or falling into analytic traps that other scholars have already identified. We also thought it would be useful, especially for those teaching these materials, to try to loosely categorize it. The organization of the list is meant merely as a first-pass, provisional sense-making effort. Within categories the entries are offered in chronological order, to help make sense of these rapid developments.

In light of this, we encourage you to see it as an unfinished document. There are 132 citations on the list, but we suspect there are many more to include. We very much welcome comments, including recommendations of other work to include, suggestions on how to reclassify a particular entry, or ideas for reorganizing the categories themselves. Please use the comment space at the bottom of the page itself; we will try to update the list in light of your suggestions.

https://socialmediacollective.org/reading-lists/critical-algorithm-studies/

or

http://bit.ly/crit-algo