The algorithm at work? Explanation and repair in the enactment of similarity in art data

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the work practices involved in making data legible to machines and machine output legible to humans. The study is based on ethnographic research of a team of art experts at DNArt – a data classification system that features a growing database of art images, a classification scheme, a similarity matching algorithm, and a website that together serve as a consumer judgment device in an emerging online market for art. I analyze interactions from meeting observations, interviews, documentation, and online interaction data to show how non-technical art experts explain and repair sociotechnical breakdowns – when their expectations for similarity between art images and artists differ from the similarity relations produced by the algorithm. By repairing breakdowns, the art experts construct the algorithm anew, as a legitimate revealer of similarity in art. In doing so, the team's repair work is folded back into the black box of the algorithm, rendering it invisible and unacknowledged, sometimes even by the experts themselves.

KEYWORDS:

• Work practices
• organizational studies
• classification
• big data
• communication studies
• ethnography

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to David Stark, Moran Levy, and the insightful reviewers for their invaluable feedback and assistance in preparing this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

S. E. Sachs is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Columbia University. Email: [email protected].

Notes

1 The name of the organization has been changed for publication.

2 This discovery is constrained by assumptions about ‘taste’ and ‘art’ that are built into the DNArt system but are outside the scope of this paper.

3 From the Grid definition:

Artworks with grids in them are most often abstract and are geometrically precise. The grid is usually associated with the work of 1960s Minimalist and Conceptual artists, such as Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd, and was generally used to create an un-hierarchical composition, absent of traditional imagery or meaning.

4 Each encounter is also shaped, to some extent, by a host of other factors, such as the environment in which an individual is genoming – particularly given that the work is remote.