So, I share my name with quite a bunch of other people. In a search engine culture, where names are queries, this does lead to confusion, for I am but one of many. But no longer, Google has just shown me how I can rise above the other BRs:

Edit: slides

On Thursday, I will be giving a talk at the “The Lived Logics of Database Machinery” workshop, organized by computational culture, which will take place at the Wellcome Collection Conference Centre in London, from 10h to 17h30. I am very much looking forward to this, although I’ll be missing a couple of days from the currently ongoing DMI summer school. This is what I will be talking about:

ORDER BY column_name. The Relational Database as Pervasive Cultural Form

This contribution starts from the observation that, in a way similar to the computational equivalence of programming languages, the major types of database models (network, relational, object-oriented, etc.) and implementations are all able to store and manage a very large variety of data structures. This means that most data structures could be modeled, in one way or another, in almost any existing database system. So why have there been so many intense debates about how to conceive and build database systems? Just like with programming languages, the specific way a database system embeds an abstract concept in a set of concrete methods and mechanisms for specifying, accessing, and manipulating datasets is significant. Different database models and implementations imply different ways of “thinking” data organization, they vary in performance, robustness, and “logistics” (one of the reasons why Oracle’s product succeeded well in the enterprise sector in the 1980s, despite its lack of certain features, was the ability to make backups of a running database), and they provide different modes of interaction with both the data and the system.

The central vector of differentiation, however, is the question how users “see” the data: during the “database debates” of the 1970s and 1980s the idea of the database as a set of tables (relational model) was put in opposition to the vision of the database as a network of records (network model). The difference between the two concerned not only performance, flexibility, and complexity, but also the crucial question who the users of these systems would be in the first place. The supporters of the network model clearly saw the programmer as the target audience for database systems but the promoters of the much simpler relational model and its variants imagined “accountants, engineers, architects, and urban planners” (Chamberlin and Boyce 1974) to directly interact with data by means of a simple query language. While this vision has not played out, according to Michael Stonebreaker’s famous observation, SQL (the most popular, albeit impure implementation of Codd’s relational ideas) has indeed become “intergalactic data-speak” (most packages on the market provide SQL interfaces) and this standardization has strongly facilitated the penetration of database systems into all corners of society and contributed to a widespread “relational view” of data organization and manipulation, even if data modeling is still mostly in expert hands.

The goal of this contribution is to examine this “relational view” in terms of what Jack Goody called the “modes of thought” associated with writing, and in particular with the list form, which “encourages the ordering of the items, by number, by initial sound, by category, etc.” (Goody 1977). As with most modern technologies, the relational model implies a complex set of constraining and enabling elements. The basic structural unit, the “relation” (what most people would simply call a table) disciplines data modeling practices into logical consistency (tables only accept tuples/rows with the same attributes) while remaining “semantically impoverished” (Stonebreaker 1993). Heterogeneity is purged from the relational model on the level of modeling, especially if compared to navigational approaches (e.g. XPath or DOM), but the “set-at-a-time” retrieval concept, combined with a declarative query language, affords remarkable flexibility and expressiveness on the level of data selection. The relational view thus implies an “ontology” consisting of regular, uniform, and only loosely connected objects that can be ordered in a potentially unlimited number of ways at the time of retrieval (by means of the query language, i.e. without having to program explicit retrieval routines). In this sense, the relational model perfectly fits the qualities that Callon and Muniesa (2005) attribute to “powerful” calculative agency: handle a long list of diverse entities, keep the space of possible classifications and reclassifications largely open, multiply possible hierarchies and classifications. What database systems then do, is bridging the gap between these calculative capacities and other forms of agency by relating them to different forms of performativity (e.g., in SQL speak, to SELECT, TRIGGER, and VIEW).
While the relational model’s simplicity has led to many efforts to extend or replace it in certain application areas, its near universal uptake in business and government means that the logistics of knowledge and ordering implied by the relational ontology resonate through the technological layers and database schemas into the domains of management, governance, and everyday practices.

I will argue that the vision of the “programmer as navigator” trough a database (Bachman 1973) has, in fact, given way to a setting where database consultants, analysts, and modelers sit between software engineering on the one side and management on the other, (re)defining procedures and practices in terms of the relational model. Especially in business and government sectors, central forms of management and evaluation (reporting, different forms of data analysis, but also reasoning in terms of key performance indicators and, more generally, “evidence based” management) are directly related to the technological and cognitive standardization effects derived from the pervasiveness of relational databases. At the risk of overstretching my argument, I would like to propose that Thrift’s (2005) “knowing capitalism” indeed knows (largely) in terms of the relational model.

Last week Google introduced its new, ontology driven infobox and I have just been included into the roll-out. The whole knowledge modelling thing is quite a slippery slope though. Just compare these two boxes:

I don’t know about you, but I guess that Hitler l’auteur is perhaps not the most fitting template.

I have started to work a bit on a forthcoming paper on the history and conceptual thrust of probabilistic indexing in Information Retrieval (“naive Bayes classifiers” for the connoisseurs) – which will also be a chapter of a forthcoming book – and while researching I stumbled over a beautiful paper. E. M. Maron, one of the central pioneers in that field, worked at the RAND corporation in the early 1960 and when not developing prototype systems that used Bayes’ theorem for “fuzzy” document scoring, he wrote memoranda on wider subjects, such as cybernetics ; “Computers and our future” is a very short piece from 1966 that is extremely lucid in terms of the questions it asks. Consider these three points about “the basic characteristics of machines [computers] and at their implications”:

  • Computers operate at exceedingly high speeds. What does this imply? This means that if a high speed machine is used to control a complex situation, then it could compute an action to be taken and execute that action before a human could intervene. What are the potential dangers?
  • Computers, at least at present, demand extreme precision in their instructions. They take their instructions literally. Could there be a tendency to delegate a complex decision to a machine and find out that the machine did what we asked, but that it was not what we wanted – because we ourselves did not fully comprehend the fine structure of our own instructions? What are the full implications of this?
  • Computers have the capacity to handle large amounts of data. They can digest, analyze and relate these data in complete detail. If these data concern financial and personal information on people, what are the implications for the concept of privacy, for improper manipulation and control? What happens when large amounts of information about the economic and political aspects of a society are fed back to the citizens of that society? What is the influence of this information on the truth of the information? Can this type of information, when fed back, cause instabilities – economic and political? (Could the information flow – feedback, overload, and instability – be modeled?)

I would argue that these are extremely timely questions, and they show how aware at least some of the technical pioneers were in terms of the wider implications of the work they were doing. There is a tendency to caricature the cyberneticians of the 1950s and 1960s as narrow-minded taylorist technocrats, but I guess the story is more complicated after all…

Yesterday, Google introduced a new feature, which represents a substantial extension to how their search engine presents information and marks a significant departure from some of the principles that have underpinned their conceptual and technological approach since 1998. The “knowledge graph” basically adds a layer to the search engine that is based on formal knowledge modelling rather than word statistics (relevance measures) and link analysis (authority measures). As the title of the post on Google’s search blog aptly points out, the new features work by searching “things not strings”, because what they call the knowledge graph is simply a – very large – ontology, a formal description of objects in the world. Unfortunately, the roll-out is progressive and I have not yet been able to access the new features, but the descriptions, pictures, and video paint a rather clear picture of what product manager Johanna Wright calls the move “from an information engine to a knowledge engine”. In terms of the DIKW model (Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom), the new feature proposes to move up a layer by adding a box of factual information on a recognized object (the examples Google uses are the Taj Mahal, Marie Curie, Matt Groening, etc.) next to the search results. From the presentation, we can gather that the 500 million objects already referenced will include a large variety of things, such as movies, events, organizations, ideas, and so on.

This is really a very significant extension to the current logic and although we’ll need more time to try things out and get a better understanding of what this actually means, there are a couple of things that we can already single out:

  • On a feature level, the fact box brings Google closer to “knowledge engines” such as Wolfram Alpha and as we learn from the explanatory video, this explicitly includes semantic or computational queries, such as “how many women won the Nobel Prize?” type of questions.
  • If we consider Wikipedia to be a similar “description layer”, the fact box can also be seen as a competitor to everybody’s favorite encyclopedia, which is a further step into the direction of bringing information directly to the surface of the results page instead of simply referring to a location. This means that users do not have to leave the Google garden to find a quick answer. It will be interesting to see whether this will actually show up in Wikipedia traffic stats.
  • The introduction of an ontology layer is a significant departure from the largely statistical and graph theoretical methods favored by Google in the past. While features based on knowledge modelling have proliferated around the margins (e.g. in Google Maps and Local Search), the company is now bringing them to the center stage. From what I understand, the selection of “facts” to display will be largely driven by user statistics but the facts themselves come from places like Freebase, which Google bought in 2010. While large scale ontologies were prohibitive in the past, a combination of the availability of crowd-sourced databases (Wikipedia, etc.), the open data movement, better knowledge extraction mechanisms, and simply the resources to hire people to do manual repairs has apparently made them a viable option for a company of Google’s size.
  • Competing with the dominant search engine has just become a lot harder (again). If users like the new feature, the threshold for market entry moves up because this is not a trivial technical gimmick that can be easily replicated.
  • The knowledge graph will most certainly spread out into many other services (it’s already implemented in the new Google Docs research bar), further boosting the company’s economies of scale and enhancing cross-navigation between the different services.
  • If the fact box – and the features that may follow – becomes a pervasive and popular feature, Google’s participation in making information and knowledge accessible, in defining its shape, scope, and relevance, will be further extended. This is a reason to worry a bit more, not because the Google tools as such are a danger, but simply because of the levels of institutional and economic concentration the Internet has enabled. The company has become what Michel Callon calls an “obligatory passage point” in our relation to the Web and beyond; the knowledge graph has the potential to exacerbate the situation even further.

This is a development that looks like another element in the war for dominance on the Web that is currently fought at a frenetic pace. Since the introduction of actions into Facebook’s social graph, it has become clear that approaches based on ontologies and concept modelling will play an increasing role in this. In a world mediated by screens, the technological control of meaning – the one true metamedium – is the new battleground. I guess that this is not what Berners-Lee had in mind for the Semantic Web…

Last Friday, I received an exciting present in the mail: Dénes König’s Theorie der endlichen und unendlichen Graphen from 1936, the first textbook on graph theory ever written (thank you Universitätsbibliothek der FU Berlin for not wanting it anymore). When reading the introduction, I stumbled over this beautiful quote:

Vielleicht noch mehr als der Berührung der Menschheit mit der Natur verdankt die Graphentheorie der Berührung der Menschen untereinander.

Here is my translation, although it does not do justice to the poetry of the German quote (Dativ FTW!):

Perhaps even more than to the contact between mankind and nature, graph theory owes to the contact of human beings between each other.

one of Moreno's famous sociograms

I am currently writing a paper to submit to the new and very exciting journal computational culture on the use of graph theory to produce “evaluative metrics” in contexts like Web search or social networking. One of my core arguments is going to be that the network as descriptive (mathematical) model has never stood in opposition to the notion of hierarchy but should rather be seen as a conceptual tool that was used in different fields (e.g. sociometry, psychometry, citation analysis, etc.) over the 20th century to investigate structure and, in particular, to both investigate and establish hierarchy. This finally gave me an excuse to dive into Jacob L. Moreno’s opus magnum Who Shall Survive? from 1934, which not only founded sociometry but also laid the ground work for social network analysis. This is one of the strangest books I have ever read, not only because the edition from 1978 reveals the author as a deeply Nietzschean character (“Actually, I have written two bibles, an old testament and a new testament.“), but also because the sociogenic therapy Moreno proposes as an approach to the “German-Jewish conflict” puts the whole text in a deeply saddening light. But these aspects only deepen the impression that this is a fascinating book, really one of its kind.

Interestingly, Moreno also discovered what we would now call “power-law dynamics in social networks”. One of the applications of his “sociometric test” – basically a “who do you like” type of questionnaire – in a small American town named Hudson came to the following result:

After the first phase of the sociometric test was given the analysis of the choices revealed that among a population of 435 persons,23 204, or 46.5%, remained unchosen after the 1st choice; 139, or 30%, after the 2d choice; 87, or 20%, after the 3rd choice; 74, or 17%, after the 4th choice; and 66, or 15%, after the 5th choice. (Moreno 1934, p. 249)

Moreno's comparison of distributions

This means that 15% of the population was not mentioned when the interviewees were asked which five people in the community they liked best. While this does not make for a particularly skewed distribution, Moreno transposes the result on the population of New York city and adds a quite tantalizing interpretation:

There is no question but that this phenomenon repeats itself throughout the nation, however widely the number of unchosen may vary from 1st to 5th or more choices due to the incalculable influence of sexual, racial, and other psychological currents. For New York, with a population of 7,000,000, the above percentages would be after the 1st choice, 3,200,000 individuals unchosen; after the 2nd choice, 2,100,000 unchosen; after the 3rd choice, 1,400,000 unchosen; after the 4th choice, 1,200,000 unchosen; and after the 5th choice, 1,050,000 unchosen. These calculations suggest that mankind is divided not only into races and nations, religions and states, but into socionomic divisions. There is produced a socionomic hierarchy due to the differences in attraction of particular individuals and groups for other particular individuals and groups. (Moreno 1934, p. 250f)

By looking into the history of the field, I hope to show that the observation of uneven distributions of connectivity in real-world networks, e.g. the work by Hindman and others concerning the Web, are certainly not a discovery of the “new science of networks” of recent years but a virtual constant in mathematical approaches to networks: whenever somebody starts counting, the result is an ordered list, normally with a considerable difference in value between the first and the last element. When it comes to applications of sociometry to sociology or anthropology, the question of leadership, status, influence, etc. is permanently in the forefront, especially from the 1950s onward when matrix algebra starts to allow for quick calculations of different forms of centrality. Contrary to popular myth, when Page and Brin came up with PageRank, they had a very wide variety of inspirational sources to draw from. Networks and ranking had been an old couple for quite a while already.

In 1953, Leo Katz, psychologist of the measuring kind, wrote the following:

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a new method of computing status, taking into account not only the number of direct “votes” received by each individual but, also, the status of each individual who chooses the first, the status of each who chooses these in turn, etc. Thus, the proposed new index allows for who chooses as well as how many choose.

The paper this is taken from is one of the references in Larry Page’s PageRank patent

The emerging field of software studies (and micro-annexes like “code studies”) shows a remarkable interest in code obfuscation (e.g. here, here, and here), a fun practice for creative programmers that plays on the fact that source code is text and can therefore be endlessly transformed (there are also more serious uses for obfuscation, generally in situations where source code is visible by design, e.g. JavaScript on the Web). While the practice of making a program’s source code unreadable without breaking functionality is indeed a way of approaching software from a potentially revelatory angle, I am somewhat astounded by how much attention humanities scholars pay to an exercise that is diametrically opposed to what 99% of all programmers spend considerable blood, sweat, and tears on every day, namely to make their code readable.

Code obfuscation as creative and playful practice for expert programmers speaks to the humanities’ interest in the original, the artistic, the deviant, and the critical but there is a real danger of losing connection with the mundane practice of writing software, where considerable energy is spent on writing code in a way that other people can easily understand it and, perhaps even more importantly, that a programmer can understand it quickly herself when coming back to a script or module weeks or months after it was written.

As most programmers will attest, the considerable difficulty of programming lies not so much in the “programming” part but in the managing of large amounts of stuff: complex architectures that span over many modules, huge APIs and libraries that provide highly specialized functionality, programming languages with always growing numbers of comfort functions (just look at how many array functions there are now in PHP), pages and pages of (sometimes badly written) documentation, different versions of basically everything, and – of course – the large amounts of code we ourselves and the people we work with have written, not so rarely under considerable time constraints, which leads of course to less than stellar code. The logistical dimension of programming is considerable.

SVN systems, powerful IDE’s (for somebody like me who only programs a couple of hours per week, autocomplete and integrated documentation are simply a godsend), and better development methodology obviously make the task of negotiating this massive environment a lot more bearable, but these tools are not eliminating the need to read code all the time to understand what’s going on. That’s why we try to make it readable as we write it and good refactoring (going over one’s code after the functionality is implemented) treats readability as a priority. But still, every programmer I know has, at one point in time, decided to write a library or a program herself simply because she didn’t want to experience the excruciating pain of reading somebody else’s poorly written code. This is how bad things can get.

Computer Science literature (like Steve McConnell’s classic Code Complete) and the Web are full of guidelines on how to write readable code and recommendations are intensely discussed and can be extremely detailed. I would like to argue here that one can learn as much – or more – about software by looking at strategies for readability than by looking at obfuscation. Some things are rather obvious, like choosing good names for modules, classes, functions, and variables; or like code indentation, which some programming languages have even made a requirement. Good commenting seems to be rather evident as well but there are many different schools of thought on that and automated comment generation in certain programming editors has not lead to real standardization. In general, while there is certainly wide agreement on the need for readability, the persistence of differences in style makes it clear that this is largely a question of convention and therefore depends on normative agreement rather than on simply finding the “best” technique.

But what I find most interesting about the question of readability is that beyond the cited elements lurk even more difficult questions that concern the borders between readability and architecture and between readability and complexity. Ed Lippert for example writes: “Don’t write ‘clever’ code; the maintenance programmers don’t have time to figure out your cleverness when it turns out to be broken.” This points to some of the basic tensions in modern software design and engineering: while programmers learn to value elegance, efficiency, and compact code, the requirements of large teams with a high degree of division of labor and the general speed-up of hardware can make readability a higher priority than execution speed or compactness. This can also mean to not use certain obscure functions or syntactical conventions. Consider these two examples in JavaScript:

variable1 = (variable2 == 10) ? 20 : false;

and

if(variable2 == 10) {
  variable1 = 20;
} else {
  variable1 = false;
}

These two elements are functionally equivalent; the first one however is much shorter and, especially for less experienced programmers, more difficult to read and understand.

Another question concerns when and how to divide code into functions, objects, modules, etc. Dustin Boswell and and Trevor Foucher’s Art of Readable Code for example recommends to “extract unrelated subproblems” by moving the code into a subroutine. While this may be straightforward in many cases, what the “reader” needs to know to understand the code can vary a lot from one case to another. Creating subroutines can certainly help with readability (and make code more easily reusable), but it a) means that the reader has to track down the subroutines and b) may make the code more complex simply because the subroutine may take into account different use cases that have to be distinguished. While redundancy is often considered a crime, it can have benefits when it comes to readability.

The subject of readability can be (and is) discussed infinitely but what is significant from a software studies’ perspective is that the problem points to the incursion of a social and economic context into the practice of programming. Not only do we ask “what is my code supposed to do?”, but also “who is going to read my code?”, “will other people work with my code?”, “is this something I will reuse?”, “how important is execution speed?”, and so on. While studying obfuscation points to the duality of computer code as text and machine, the readability question reveals it as caught up in various contexts that have to be negotiated in the practice of programming itself. That code is executable is the technical condition for software. That code is readable is not a requirement on the same level; but it has become a major aspect to a program’s capacity to become part of an increasingly structured professional practice.

In the middle of December, a French appeals court published its verdict in a case concerning Google’s instant/autocomplete/suggest feature and the company was fined $65K. After the holidays, a couple of publications (e.g. searchengineland and Ars Technica) picked up the story and as in every case where French legislation diverts from US sensibilities the comment sections erupted with chauvinistic righteousness. What was the case about? Here is the full text of a notice by the Courthouse News Service:

A French court fined Google $65,000 because the search engine’s autocomplete function prompts the French word for crook when users type the name of a certain company. Lyonnaise de Garantie, an insurance company, said staffers at Google should have monitored linked words better. Google had argued that it was not liable since the word, added under Google Suggest, was the result of an automatic algorithm and did not come from human thought. A Paris court ruled against Google, however, pointing out that the search engine ignored requests to remove the offending word – “escroc,” which means crook in French. In addition to the fine, Google must also remove the term from searches associated with Lyonnaise de Garantie.

Unfortunately, this is basically all the information that circulated in English. But it’s always interesting to have a closer look at how lawmakers and judges look at information-systems-as-media question and so I went to have a look at the text of the actual verdict.
There are a couple of points that are really quite remarkable here, and make the case much more interesting than it appears. Google’s arguments basically made three arguments:

  • We are an American company and therefore… (I will not go into the questions that are not specific to Web search.)
  • The suggest feature is purely “informatic” and does not represent an “intellectual act”, a “value judgement” or an “opinion”. (This is the common argument, nothing new here.)
  • The “average internet user” knows that search suggestions are not content. In fact, users do not make any interpretations independently from search results. There is “no confusion in their minds” about the difference. (Finally, things are getting more interesting!)

The judge however did not see things this way and made a series of quite remarkable observations:

  • If the process is fully automated, how does Google remove “offensive” and “vulgar” terms from the suggestion lists? Obviously, intervention is possible and regularly applied, even for content – such as vulgarity – that is not illegal. So why not in this case?
  • While it would certainly be difficult to find all cases where individuals or companies are put in a bad light in a suggest list, Google was perfectly aware in this case, because the company in question had contacted them repeatedly.
  • While the procedure may be automatic, the phrase “Lyonnaise de Garantie escroc” is a human judgement and its circulation on the net is made possible by the machinery. Using algorithms is just another way of “organizing and presenting human thought”.
  • The phase appears already at the moment when one types “Lyonnaise de G” and this “suddenness” has the effect of “imposing the expression” on the user.
  • When looking at the results for the query, they do not explain why the term “escroc” is attributed to the company, i.e. the content does not signal any facts that would justify the term.

Now these are some interesting arguments and while I am not qualified to comment on the validity of the judgement, there is a stark contrast between Google’s and the judge’s framing of the question. While Google makes an ontological argument (“an algorithm cannot have an opinion”), the judge pushes that argument into the background and bases the verdict on the question “can Google be bothered to remove a text that is injurious?”. The answer is “yes”, because a) intervention is obviously possible and b) they were made aware by the plaintiff. It also treats the “instant” feature as living up to its former name: “suggest”.

While regulation of “indecency” is much less pronounced in Europe than in the US, libel laws are of course much stricter, but I do not want to comment on that. What I find thoroughly fascinating about this case is that legal professionals are forced to form opinions about questions as ambiguous as algorithmic agency. By choosing to judge outcomes rather than methodology, the judge in this case (and the judges that treated it in the first instance) have created a precedent that may affect the use of statistical and other techniques that often produce unforeseeable effects. On the other hand side, the verdict is largely based on the fact the the plaintiffs requests for removal were ignored. Google is by no means forced to police suggest features in the future.

Automated information systems order information very differently from manually compiled catalogs or category systems. They produce different forms of “intelligence” and it is difficult to think about their directness in terms of opinion or partisanship. What just happened in this case however is that, at least on a legal level, the gap between the two elements was closed a little bit. The judge did not require Google to put the algorithm on a leash but told them to pick up its mess.