Convergence, Ahead of Print.
Social media research software has come to play increasingly important roles in processes of knowledge production. While epistemological, logistical, legal, and ethical concerns put the spotlight on the software tools researchers are relying on, little attention is paid to the role of the ‘toolmaker’ beyond a vague idea of the ‘power’ wielded by those who design, develop, and maintain these technical artifacts. This paper seeks to address this role, both conceptually and with attention to practical concerns, as a form of hybrid and relational authorship. We thereby shift the focus from tool to tool-making, from artifact to practice, in an attempt to produce a different kind of ‘unblackboxing’ of tools than the somewhat overused tropes of open source code or open data. Our contribution proceeds in three steps. We first address tools and tool-making from a theoretical perspective, suggesting that their epistemological orientation reaches more deeply into the networks of research practice than words like ‘bias’ admit and proposing to consider the specific kind of hybrid authorship that emerges in this context. Calling on our own experiences as toolmakers, we then reflect on a cluster of issues where this authorial function becomes particularly visible. Here, we examine how motivations and commitments orient what a piece of software does and how it does it and discuss tool-making from the perspectives of co-development, maintenance and care, and ethics by design. We conclude by arguing that the most pressing concerns for tool-making lie in institutional arrangements that are crucial for the life of research software.

Convergence, Ahead of Print.
This article considers how the pursuit of problematization advocated by Agre’s concept of critical technical practice has been articulated in relation to the increasing proliferation of interfaces across everyday life. While the ethos of Agre’s work to bridge the split identity of critique and craft can readily be found in reflexive design or software art, these cases are not always situated within broader ecologies of practice that also grapple with the asymmetries and exploitative aspects of interface design. Drawing from software studies and media theoretical accounts of the interface as a fluid milieu, I provide a navigational matrix to contextualize modes of interface critique at large, namely specifying traps and enclosures, surfacing asymmetries and augmenting alternatives. I argue, finally, that these modes provide an invitation to develop new metacritical theories and common capacities, particularly through the possibilities of grappling with systems of domination otherwise built to prefigure our experiences of them.

Convergence, Volume 29, Issue 5, Page 1168-1182, October 2023.
Homestuck is a hypermediated webcomic adventure that tells its story through music, animation, gameplay and even the structural features of its Web site interface. But it has also been 1) published in print as a book series and 2) ported to a new host to preserve content that used Flash Player, which is now obsolete. Both print publication and digital port simultaneously reproduce and recreate the first iteration of Homestuck – that is, they do and do not adapt it. This article uses adaptation theory to approach the under-researched question of the transition of a work from a digital format to print and porting. It identifies key sites of adaptation in what might otherwise be called versions and discusses the consequences of changes in medium/mode. The article highlights areas where the interactive mode must be adapted to showing or telling and explores how new interactive modes can emerge from a codex. It argues that Homestuck’s metafictional narratives in particular must be adapted in these new versions because they arise from an interactive relationship with the reader. Because the earlier webcomic has now been wholly replaced by the port, understanding these changes as adaptation allows us to see what is at stake the preservation of digital-born works. Homestuck’s versions show adaptation theory to be a vital lens for understanding the consequences of the differences that arise when multimedia digital-born works are reproduced with other technologies, an occurrence that will only grow more frequent over time.

Convergence, Ahead of Print.
In this article, we reconsider elements of Agre’s critical technical practice approach (Agre, 1997) for critical technical practice approach for reflexive artificial intelligence (AI) research and explore ways and expansions to make it productive for an operationalization in contemporary data science. Drawing on Jörg Niewöhner’s co-laboration approach, we show how frictions within interdisciplinary work can be made productive for reflection. We then show how software development environments can be repurposed to infrastructure reflexivities and to make co-laborative engagement with AI-related technology possible and productive. We document our own co-laborative engagement with machine learning and highlight three exemplary critical technical practices that emerged out of the co-laboration: negotiating comparabilities, shifting contextual attention and challenging similarity and difference. We finally wrap up the conceptual and empirical elements and propose Reflexive Data Science (RDS) as a methodology for co-laborative engagement and infrastructured reflexivities in contemporary AI-related research. We come back to Agre’s ways of operationalizing reflexivity and introduce the building blocks of RDS: (1) organizing encounters of social contestation, (2) infrastructuring a network of anchoring devices enabling reflection, (3) negotiating timely matters of concern and (4) designing for reflection. With our research, we aim at contributing to the methodological underpinnings of epistemological and social reflection in contemporary AI research.

Convergence, Ahead of Print.
This paper presents and justifies Gephisto, an experimental tool visualizing networks in one click. Gephisto’s design exemplifies how we can interfere with a user’s utilitarian goals, by giving them what they wish (an easy way to get a network map) but in disobedient ways (the produced map is different every time the tool is used) that encourage them to engage further with the tool’s methodological tenets. As an apparatus, Gephisto aims to incentivize untrained users to become more critical of their network mapping practices. As an intervention into the field of digital methods, it aims to show that tools that support critical thinking do not have to be hard to use and hostile to beginners. We criticize the idea that tools range from easy-to-use black boxes for unreflexive lazy-thinkers, to complex and demanding instruments for hard-thinking experts. We argue that learners need ease of use and critical thinking at the same time, and that it is possible to design tools that support both needs at once. We offer an alternative model where we acknowledge the active role of the user in deciding the tradeoff between learning to master the tool, and progressing toward their utilitarian goals. We argue that the design of the tool should not oppose the beginner’s need for assistance in decision making, but find other ways to incentivize critical thinking.

Convergence, Ahead of Print.
This paper introduces and contextualises Climate Futures, an experiment in which AI was repurposed as a ‘co-author’ of climate stories and a co-designer of climate-related images that facilitate reflections on present and future(s) of living with climate change. It converses with histories of writing and computation, including surrealistic ‘algorithmic writing’, recombinatory poems and ‘electronic literature’. At the core lies a reflection about how machine learning’s associative, predictive and regenerative capacities can be employed in playful, critical and contemplative goals. Our goal is not automating writing (as in product-oriented applications of AI). Instead, as poet Charles Hartman argues, ‘the question isn’t exactly whether a poet or a computer writes the poem, but what kinds of collaboration might be interesting’ (1996, p. 5). STS scholars critique labs as future-making sites and machine learning modelling practices and, for example, describe them also as fictions. Building on these critiques and in line with ‘critical technical practice’ (Agre, 1997), we embed our critique of ‘making the future’ in how we employ machine learning to design a tool for looking ahead and telling stories on life with climate change. This has involved engaging with climate narratives and machine learning from the critical and practical perspectives of artistic research. We trained machine learning algorithms (i.e. GPT-2 and AttnGAN) using climate fiction novels (as a dataset of cultural imaginaries of the future). We prompted them to produce new climate fiction stories and images, which we edited to create a tarot-like deck and a story-book, thus also playfully engaging with machine learning’s predictive associations. The tarot deck is designed to facilitate conversations about climate change. How to imagine the future beyond scenarios of resilience and the dystopian? How to aid our transition into different ways of caring for the planet and each other?

Convergence, Ahead of Print.
In this article, we examine how critical thinking, methods and design are used within the tech industry, using Philip Agre’s notion of critical technical practice (CTP) to consider the rise of ‘cynical’ technical practice. Arguments by tech firms that their AI systems are ethical, contextual, situated or fair, as well as APIs that are privacy-compliant and offer greater user control, are now commonplace. Yet, these justifications routinely disguise the organisational, and economic, reasons for the development of technical systems and features. The article considers how different forms of ‘technical critique’ are used by technical practitioners such as software engineers, applying Agre’s work on CTP, AI planning, grammars of action and empowerment to evaluate, and contextualise these justifications. As Agre understood, technical practitioners are not necessarily ‘a-critical’ or ‘uncritical’ in their approach to the design of technological systems or methods, but ordinarily compare the utility or performance of such according to a golden ethic: ‘does it work?’. Drawing on Agre’s studies of AI in the 1990s, the article considers how and what Agre considered to be the ‘Cartesian soul’ of AI research, on linguistic structuralism, and continues to frame much work within the wider tech industry today. Yet increasingly, as the article shows, ‘narrow’ and cynical forms of technical criticality are being used to legitimise, and publicise, corporate strategies of tech firms, whether through the development of AI systems by automotive start-ups such as Comma, or the management of relations with external developers through APIs, in the case of Facebook. Rather than judging the moral character of technical practitioners, however, the article offers an approach – via the work of Philip Agre – to examine how critical thinking is used, and often abused, within and beyond the tech industry.