From: "Cliff Lynch" <CNI-ANNOUNCE@cni.org>
Sender: <cgplmgr@cni.org>
To: CNI-ANNOUNCE
Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2017 07:55:47 -0500
Message-ID: <redirect-33534485@cni.org>
Subject: Documenting Personalization & Social Media: My New FIrst Monday
 Paper
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I'm thrilled and honored to  to share the news that I've got a paper in 
the new December 2017 issue of First Monday (open access), which 
summarizes about a year of thinking about and studying how we might 
document the plethora of systems (including social media) that make 
heavy use of personalization and often also machine learning algorithms 
of various sorts. I have come to the conclusion that traditional 
digital preservation approaches are not likely to be helpful here and 
that very different approaches are needed. This raises some interesting 
questions about roles and responsibilities in the enterprise of 
stewardship of the cultural record. I suspect that some of this may be 
controversial, but I think it's a conversation that we need to 
undertake. I would welcome any thoughts from our community on this. 

I'll have a few things to say about this in my opening plenary at the 
upcoming CNI member meeting in Washington DC in a few day. 

Here's the pointer to the paper:

http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/8097/6583

and I've pasted the abstract below.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

-----------------------------------------------

Abstract

This paper explores pragmatic approaches that might be employed to 
document the behavior of large, complex socio-technical systems (often 
today shorthanded as “algorithms”) that centrally involve some 
mixture of personalization, opaque rules, and machine learning 
components. Thinking rooted in traditional archival methodology ― 
focusing on the preservation of physical and digital objects, and 
perhaps the accompanying preservation of their environments to permit 
subsequent interpretation or performance of the objects ― has been a 
total failure for many reasons, and we must address this problem. The 
approaches presented here are clearly imperfect, unproven, 
labor-intensive, and sensitive to the often hidden factors that the 
target systems use for decision-making (including personalization of 
results, where relevant); but they are a place to begin, and their 
limitations are at least outlined. Numerous research questions must be 
explored before we can fully understand the strengths and limitations 
of what is proposed here. But it represents a way forward. This is 
essentially the first paper I am aware of which tries to effectively 
make progress on the stewardship challenges facing our society in the 
so-called “Age of Algorithms;” the paper concludes with some 
discussion of the failure to address these challenges to date, and the 
implications for the roles of archivists as opposed to other players in 
the broader enterprise of stewardship ― that is, the capture of a 
record of the present and the transmission of this record, and the 
records bequeathed by the past, into the future. It may well be that we 
see the emergence of a new group of creators of documentation, perhaps 
predominantly social scientists and humanists, taking the front lines 
in dealing with the “Age of Algorithms,” with their materials then 
destined for our memory organizations to be cared for into the future.