Provincializing Impact

Abstract

During the Cold War bibliometrics took on a privileged role in the discourse of global scientific development. This essay locates a key condition of possibility for this development in the consolidation of the “international scientific literature” at the turn of the twentieth century through international bureaucratic projects that were fueled by European imperial anxieties. When citation analysis emerged in this political context in the 1960s and 1970s, it was commitments to largely qualitative criteria—regarding open communication, universality, and standards of peer review—that sustained their legitimacy. The conditions of possibility for what has now come to be seen as a form of epistemic injustice by algorithm has as much to do with craft as code. Attending to this historical genealogy is crucial if we wish to better understand the nature of more recent forms of algorithm discrimination.