The Algorithm as a Cultural Informant: Exploring AI-Mediated Realities Through Computational Ethnography

This chapter also treats algorithms as culture informants, extending an account of computational ethnography that attempts to link interpretive depth with computational scale. From a qualitative and constructivist perspective, algorithms are cast as epistemic agents, cultural artefacts encoding design values that serve to cultural actors to mediate meaning,norms and visibility. The chapter combines digital traces, human-AI interaction and reflexive recordings with more traditional ethnographic techniques such as interviews and fieldnotes. It introduces an analytical hybrid combining NLP, topic modeling, sentiment analysis and LLM facilitated reflexive coding under human governance. Transparency, bias auditing, and Human-Centered AI principles ensure the ethical and epistemic rigor of our approaches. The chapter finishes by discussing the implications for social, organizational and CSR research in promoting reflexive, co-constructed human-AI inquiry that considers algorithms as situated cultural sources of knowledge.