Pip Thornton

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  • Geopolitical Algorithms: you say Palestine, Google says Israel

    If any more evidence be needed of the (geo)political agency of Google’s algorithms, then this – currently ongoing – incident is fairly definitive. A couple of days ago, Kristin Szremski, a reporter and advocate for justice in Palestine, noticed that the names she had given to photo albums she had uploaded to Google+ had been…

  • The Monster that ‘Google’ Created: some thoughts on EX MACHINA (2015)

    Earlier this week I curated and co-hosted Passengerfilms’ latest event in London (quite aptly within a stone’s throw of Silicon Roundabout). Called BEING HUMAN // HUMAN BEING, the event featured a screening and discussion of Alex Garland’s 2015 film Ex Machina. The fact that we sold out before we even started advertising I think goes…

  • Language Matters: ‘rabid feminism’ & the Oxford Dictionary

    The work I have been doing around language in a digital age has mostly involved the algorithmic reproduction of language through search engines such as Google. However, I have just come across an interesting (and very heated) debate taking place on Twitter involving Oxford Dictionaries Online, the digital version of the Oxford Dictionary of English…

  • The Geopolitics of Context: Mordor, Russia and Google Translate

  • Questioning the Digital @ The London Conference in Critical Thought 2015

    Last week saw the 2015 London Conference in Critical Thought take place at UCL. It was the first LCCT I have been to, and also my first time convening a panel at a conference. Nat O’Grady (Southampton) and I had put together a stream on ‘Questioning the Digital’, a phrase lifted from David Berry’s Critical…

  • Thinking with Algorithms

    Back in February 2015 I was lucky enough to present a paper at a workshop in Durham organised by Louise Amoore and Volha Piotukh from the Durham University Geography Department. Thinking with Algorithms: Cognition and Computation in the work of N. Katherine Hayles (which featured Hayles as a guest and keynote speaker), was an incredibly…

  • Existential Google-Angst UPDATE!

    A quick update to my blog earlier today… I wanted to put into context what I’ve talking about in terms of not ‘existing’ on the web. As I said before, I know Google ‘is not the internet’, but it does seem like it sometimes. To show this I created a Gmail account (as a Guest…

  • Existential Google-Angst

    I posted a blog over at Landscape Surgery yesterday about the challenges of getting indexed by Google without actually logging into Google: “…resisting the charmingly convenient yet data hungry ministrations of the googlebots is proving an existential challenge. I can’t ‘submit my URL’ to Google, or use any analytical or webmaster tools without creating an…

  • Language in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction

    For my first blog post I thought I’d do a little sit-rep as to where I am with my research so far, why it is of interest (to me anyway), and what I hope to achieve with it. I have started this blog in the hope that it will accompany, document and inform my research,…