Demonstrating the Algorithm

Abstract

This chapter explores the problems involved in demonstrating an algorithmic system to a variety of audiences. As the project reached its final deadlines and put on demonstrations of the technology-under-development to various audiences-including the project funders-it became ever more apparent that in a number of ways promises made to key audiences, may not be met. In project meetings, it became rapidly apparent that a number of ways of constituting a response to different audiences and their imagined demands could be offered. To manage this problem, the chapter shows that a range of different more or less 'gen-uine' demonstrations with greater or lesser integrity were discursively assembled by the project team, and ways to locate and populate, witness and manage the assessment of these demonstrations were brought to the table. The notion of integrity is used to incorporate sight, materiality and morality into the growing literature on algorithms.