Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra - Böcker

Machine learning, renowned for its ability to detect patterns in large datasets, has seen a significant increase in applications and complexity since the early 2000s. The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Machine Learning offers a state-of-the-art and forward-looking overview of the intersection between machine learning and sociology, exploring what sociology can gain from machine learning and how it can shed new light on the societal implications of this technology. Through its 39 chapters, an international group of sociologists address three key questions. First, what can sociologists yield from using machine learning as a methodological tool? This question is examined across various data types, including text, images, and sound, with insights into how machine learning and ethnography can be combined. Second, how is machine learning being used throughout society, and what are its consequences? The Handbook explores this question by examining the assumptions and infrastructures behind machine learning applications, as well as the biases they might perpetuate. Themes include art, cities, expertise, financial markets, gender, race, intersectionality, law enforcement, medicine, and the environment, covering contexts across the Global South and Global North. Third, what does machine learning mean for sociological theory and theorizing? Chapters examine this question through discussions on agency, culture, human-machine interaction, influence, meaning, power dynamics, prediction, and postcolonial perspectives. The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Machine Learning is an essential resource for academics and students interested in artificial intelligence, computational social science, and the role and implications of machine learning in society.

Since 1986, the British government, faced with dwindling budgets and growing calls for public accountability, has sought to assess the value of scholarly work in the nation’s universities. Administrators have periodically evaluated the research of most full-time academics employed in British universities, seeking to distribute increasingly scarce funding to those who use it best. How do such attempts to quantify the worth of knowledge change the nature of scholarship?Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra examines the effects of quantitative research evaluations on British social scientists, arguing that the mission to measure academic excellence resulted in less diversity and more disciplinary conformity. Combining interviews and original computational analyses, The Quantified Scholar provides a compelling account of how scores, metrics, and standardized research evaluations altered the incentives of scientists and administrators by rewarding forms of scholarship that were closer to established disciplinary canons. In doing so, research evaluations amplified publication hierarchies and long-standing forms of academic prestige to the detriment of diversity. Slowly but surely, they reshaped academic departments, the interests of scholars, the organization of disciplines, and the employment conditions of researchers.Critiquing the effects of quantification on the workplace, this book also presents alternatives to existing forms of evaluation, calling for new forms of vocational solidarity that can challenge entrenched inequality in academia.

Since 1986, the British government, faced with dwindling budgets and growing calls for public accountability, has sought to assess the value of scholarly work in the nation’s universities. Administrators have periodically evaluated the research of most full-time academics employed in British universities, seeking to distribute increasingly scarce funding to those who use it best. How do such attempts to quantify the worth of knowledge change the nature of scholarship?Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra examines the effects of quantitative research evaluations on British social scientists, arguing that the mission to measure academic excellence resulted in less diversity and more disciplinary conformity. Combining interviews and original computational analyses, The Quantified Scholar provides a compelling account of how scores, metrics, and standardized research evaluations altered the incentives of scientists and administrators by rewarding forms of scholarship that were closer to established disciplinary canons. In doing so, research evaluations amplified publication hierarchies and long-standing forms of academic prestige to the detriment of diversity. Slowly but surely, they reshaped academic departments, the interests of scholars, the organization of disciplines, and the employment conditions of researchers.Critiquing the effects of quantification on the workplace, this book also presents alternatives to existing forms of evaluation, calling for new forms of vocational solidarity that can challenge entrenched inequality in academia.