Definition of "black-boxing"

Bruno Latour, in Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies:

scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become.

Uncovering what’s inside these black-boxes could become an important task for people researching the processes by which we construct everything from budgets to automobiles to maps. In their forthcoming book, Rethinking Maps, Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins encourage researchers of maps and mapping

to open the “black-boxes” of mapping software, to start to interrogate algorithms and databases, and in particular to investigate the production of ready-made maps that appear almost magically on the interfaces of gadgets and devices we carry and use everyday, often without much overt thought about how they work and whose map they project onto their interface.

A couple of chapter downloads from Rethinking Maps are available on Martin Dodge’s website.