The Politics of Formalization: What social Computing Can Learn from the Prehistory of PageRank

摘要

Social networking sites, but also various other online services, such as search engines, rely on computational techniques, developed from the 1950s onward, to filter, rank, suggest or modulate visibility and navigational distance. Authority, reputation, and relevance are attributed by means of "mechanical reasoning", which often produces significant real-world consequences. Techniques based on social network analysis making use of graph theoretical methods are among the most common tools to establish such distinctions based on formal criteria. PageRank, a method for scoring documents in a hypertext database, has achieved particular prominence due to its use in the worlds most successful search engine.