Over the course of a generation, algorithms have gone from mathematical abstractions to powerful mediators of daily life. In evolving from static computer programs hand-coded by engineers to the products of machine learning, these technologies have made our lives more efficient, more entertaining, and, sometimes, better informed. At the same time, complex algorithms are increasingly crushing the basic rights of individual citizens. Allegedly anonymized datasets and statistical models routinely leak our most sensitive personal information; applications for everything from loans to college reflect racial and gender bias. Meanwhile, users manipulate algorithms to "game" search engines, spam filters, online reviewing services and navigation apps. Understanding and improving the science behind the algorithms that run our lives is quickly becoming one of the most pressing issues of this century. Traditional solutions, such as laws, regulations and watchdog groups, have proven woefully inadequate, at best. Derived from the cutting-edge of scientific research, The Ethical Algorithm offers a new approach: a set of principled solutions based on the emerging and exciting science of socially aware algorithm design. Weaving together the science behind algorithm design with stories of citizens, lawyers, scientists, and activists experiencing the trial-and-error of research in real-time, Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth present a strikingly original way forward, showing how we can begin to work together to protect people from the unintended impacts of algorithms-and, sometimes, protect the science that could save us from ourselves.

NARRATOLOGY attempts to determine the rules or codes of composition of a narrative and to formulate the "grammar" of narrative, that is, the structures and formulas that recur across stories with very different content. Since its inception some thirty years ago, narratology has adopted a largely formalist and structuralist focus and thus has tended to pass over contextual factors that affect a reader's experience of narratives.

In Rhetorical Narratology, Michael Kearns redresses this one-sidedness by combining traditional narratology's tools for analyzing texts with rhetoric's tools for analyzing audiences. Guiding Kearns's approach is speech-act theory, which, in emphasizing the rule-governed context in which any text is produced and received, provides the means for describing how the structures of narrative may affect certain audiences in certain ways. Rhetorical narratology applies fundamental concepts from speech-act theory to draw together the strengths of rhetoric and narratology. Rhetoric contributes the steady focus on the interaction between text and reader as that interaction occurs in specific cultural contexts and through time. Narratology provides the crucial distinction between "story" and "discourse, " -- between the "what" and the "how" of a narrative. Concentrating on the "how" has produced sophisticated treatments of such concepts as "fiction, " "narrativity, " and "point, " as well as detailed analyses of temporal structure, point of view, and speech representation. The central question that rhetorical narratology attempts to answer, then, is how do the various narrative elements isolated by narratologists actually work on readers?