Editor's Introduction

this issue and the forthcoming winter 2019 issue focus on the subject of algorithms. While it is rare for us to publish two issues that look at a single subject, this particular topic appears to us important enough to warrant it. Given the widespread use of algorithms and our ever-increasing reliance on them, it seems more than timely to bring the discussion of algorithms out of the realm of technology and into the realm of critical social inquiry. By doing so we hope to make their use more transparent and comprehensible to those who are not tech mavens, while simultaneously examining their impact on society in general and on the way we as individuals live our lives and will be living them in the future.

These days, algorithms serve to determine the news we see and the products recommended to us online; they direct the way political campaigns are framed; they play a role in setting bail and criminal sentencing; they score essays and they score teachers; they predict medical outcomes; they direct drones to their unfortunate targets; they guide driverless cars; and at times it seems they direct a driverless stock market, to name but a few of their uses.

In this first special issue of Social Research on algorithms, we asked our authors to look at these and other cases as a way of beginning to answer the many socially relevant questions raised by the widespread use of algorithms, including:

• • What are the values, ethical choices, and biases embedded in the writing and application of algorithms, and how do they operate?

• • Are there compelling reasons to make underlying assumptions clear?

• • Do the assumptions on which algorithms are based differ from the assumptions made in the formulation of any other hypothesis used to analyze data?

• • What is the significance of open versus proprietary algorithms?

• • Are there any arenas in which algorithms do not yet play a role? Are there any arenas in which they ought not play a role?

• • What does the public need to understand about algorithms?

The second of our issues on the theme of algorithms will consist of papers delivered at "Persons without Qualities: Metrics, Algorithms, and the Reshaping of the Self" (April 12–13, 2019), a conference organized by Joseph E. Davis, research associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, and sponsored by the University's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. But more about that in the introduction to that issue when it appears.