Bot Club
Theme: Legal Tech
Automation in the legal sphere
e-Courts Article in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch) on fully automated handling of cases of debt collecting by an e-Court. Intransparent decision making, contrary to consumers rights.
Theme: News Recommendation
News recommender systems and democracy An article co-authored by Sarah Eskens, from the Institute of Information Law about the implications of automated news recommmendation for the democratic role of digital media, user rights and public information policy.
Theme: Computational propaganda
Automated influencing of opinion
Computational propaganda research project by OII A transdisciplinary project from the Oxford Internet Institute investigating the relationships between algorithms, automation and politics.
Automating Hate Eric Gallagher delves into the world social bots that automate hate-mongering on Twitter, in so-called megaphoning systems.
Theme: Algorithmic racism
Reflections on the automated performance of notions of human race
Machine Biases An investigative journalistic series on algorithmic injustice and the computational biases relating to race.
Theme: Ethical bot making
Reflections on making ethical, activist or critical bots
Protest bots "A protest bot is a bot so specific you can't mistake it for bullshit". Mark Sample's call for the creation of bots that are "topical, data-based, cumulative, and oppositional".
Ethical Bot making advice Glaciologist occasional bot maker Martin O'Leary's practical advice on ethics of making bots.
Bot security and hybrid ethics Using an ecological approach Douglas Guilbeault looks at how social media propels algorithms into agency and the political problems this reveals, inviting a hybrid ethics, wherein humans and bots act together to solve problems in bot security and Internet ethics more broadl_ly. International Journal of Communication10 (2016)._
Critical Engineering Manifesto The famous Critical Engineering Manifesto outlines a fundamental critical (creative) ethics towards the practice of engineering. It also underpins the concepts of Julian Olivers' automatons.
Matteo Pasquinell (ed.) Alleys of our Mind Matteo Pasquinelli et al look into the cognitive, political, and technological composition of definitions of error, abnormality, trauma, and catastrophe in computing.
Wendy Chun: Programmed Visions In Programmed Visions Wendy Chun explores cultural notions of software, memory, visibility, logic and metaphor in new media and algorithmic culture.
Benjamin Bratton: The Stack In The Stack Benjamin Bratton investigates how the different genres of computing, such as smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, and the Internet of Things, form part of a new accidental techno-political megastructure, which can be understood as organised in the form of a stack.
Socialbots & their Friends: Digital Media & the Automation of Sociality A collection of academic texts about the role bots and algorithms play in the social lives of web users, and the critical questions surrounding them.
Interview with @NaïveQuestions bot Bot-maker Tully Hansen interviews Twitter bot @NaiveQuestions about twitter bots
Internet Bots Fight Each Other Because They're All Too Human _Wire_d Magazine's Matt Simons explores the use and deployment of 'benevolent' bots to combat 'malevolent' bots online.
How to Think About Bots A Motherboard article on the roles of botds in the public domain, and the complex relations between bot-agency and (semi-)auotonomy and and (design) ethics.
Dear Bot, What Pronouns Do You Use? BotWatch's Vivian Sming writes about the anthropomorphism of bots and how this relates to contemporary gender politics.
Bots, Bespoke Code and the Materiality of Software Platforms R. Stuart Geiger from UC-Berkeley School of Information's paper on the use of 'bespoke code' in Wikipedia, with a focus on bots, and how it relates to the discussion of regulating software systems through code. Information, Communication, and Society (2014)
#algopop Algopop is a Tumblr blog where Matthew Plummer Fernandez documents the perfomance of algorithms in popular culture and everyday life.
Social Media Collective: Research Blog Great repository of academic texts relating to critical algorithm studies.
BotWatch Online publication with multidisciplinary critical discussions about bots, which includes articles, essays, and even bots of their own.
Oxford Internet Institute The Oxford Internet Institute is one of the formost departments of social and computer sciences, based at the University of Oxford.
Digital Methods Initiative The Digital Methods Initiative is one of Europe's leading Internet Studies research groups
Hashtag #BotAlly #BotALLY is a hashtag used by a community of bot makers on twitter to label contributions on their shared practice.
The Social Media Collective Part of the Microsoft Research Lab, the Social Media Collective consists of a network of social science and humanistic researchers.
Darius Kazemi's Bot Summits Annual summit for bot-makers organised by internet artist and bot-maker Darius Kazemi.