Critical Data Study fresh from the press!
In this contribution to the latest special issue of the Swiss Journal of Sociology, I critically examine how Convolutional Neural Networks can be used to explore historical photo collections. In essence, the writing examines potentials and challenges of human-machine collaboration by juxtaposing human and machine ways of seeing. Clustering 48,000 negatives from the collection Ernst Brunner the analysis reveals how sociotechnical imaginaries in infrastructure act as an epistemological Trojan horse and emphasizes the need for thematic data sets to utilize machine-learning approaches for visual data analysis.
Open Access 
https://www.socio-journal.ch/article/view/6907
Thank you Sebastian W. Hoggenmüller for the great editing, to Kurt Fendt and Tobias Hodel for their critical remarks and to the anonymous reviewers who have given tough but constructive feedback.
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