By:
On:
In: Lara Putnam
Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

What does it really mean to do research in the digital age? We might have what seem like an easy set of answers: doing research means using Google, managing citations using organizational software like Zotero or Easy Bib, collecting and integrating quotations (we might use Endnote or Scrivener for this), accessing archives (some of which are physical, but most of which are not), and then presenting that research using a word processor. But again, what does this really mean, especially when we consider that for most of human history, research looked nothing like what I’ve just described? If a search engine does not exist, nor the Internet, neither do any of the ways we access information as it exists separately from geographic space and necessarily longer durations of time. Before such massive accumulations of digitized texts, a researcher would likely have to travel to a specific archival or fieldwork site to accrue knowledge that could only be gained in that specific way: driving to the airport, stepping on a plane, travelling to that location, and spending a significant amount of time there. But today, all of that time, money, and attention can be saved and spent on engaging with the text itself; fieldwork can be supplemented increasingly efficiently with Zoom, Skype, text and email. Our podcast guest on April 2, 2021, Dr. Lara Putnam, chatted with me about exactly how these profound and rapid changes in research methods impact our daily lives, and how we think about the world around us. Dr. Puntam is UCIS Research Read More

By:
On:
In: Uncategorized
Tagged: , , , , , ,

Happy Black History Month! The Seminar does not have any scheduled guests or podcasts so far this month, and so an opportunity arises to highlight voices & publications beyond our venerable (& growing!) list of participants. During this strange & stressful February, I wanted to make space, as SE (Shack) Hackney did last year, within Information Ecosystems to highlight some incredible and essential work by and about Black voices, and—amid a global pandemic—how race overlaps with medicine, data, and concepts of cure. What follows is an absolutely non-exhaustive reading list on topics of Blackness, medicine, data, and technology. I offer these pieces & voices as profoundly important to how we should be thinking about medicine and technology within our current moment; it is difficult to understate the debt we all owe to Black scholars, activists, scientists, doctors, and organizers, particularly in digitally-oriented spaces—but lending an eye or ear to their essential contributions is a start. And indeed, as the long shadow of COVID-19 extends toward its year-long mark, we must take seriously the disproportionally devastating impact the pandemic has had on our nation’s Black communities. Today, while the rate of hospitalization and death per 10,000 sits at 7.4 and 2.3 for white patients, it is a staggering 24.6 and 5.6 for Black patients (source). Scholars from a wide array of disciplines have over and over confirmed that the U.S. has a long and difficult history of racism in medicine. And, as our own Seminar guests—such as Dr. Safiya Noble and Dr. Sandra González-Bailón—have also confirmed, the Read More

By:
On:
In: Safiya Noble
Tagged: , , ,

Safiya Umoja Noble, known for her best-selling book, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, as well as her scholarship in Information Studies and African American studies at UCLA, visited Pitt the week of January 24. She spoke with participants in the Sawyer Seminar, gave a public talk and spoke with me in an interview for the Info Ecosystems Podcast. In Algorithms of Oppression, Dr. Noble described her experiences searching for terms related to race, women, and girls, such as “black girls” and encountering pornographic or racist content. These initial searches led her to years of study in information science, using the first page of Google search results as data. Coming from an advertising background before obtaining her Ph.D. in Library and Information Sciences, Dr. Noble was uniquely situated in the early 2010s to recognize Google for the advertising company it really is, while working in a field where many scholars around her viewed it as a source with exciting potential. Noble’s book examines what is present and absent in that first page of search results, and what those results say about the underlying mechanisms of organizing information and corporate decisions that enable those searches to occur. To open her public talk, Dr. Noble discussed several events that have occurred since her book was published in 2018. They notably included the exposure of Facebook’s privacy violations from 2017–2018 and the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement and in public housing, despite research from Dr. Joy Buolamwini indicating that facial recognition and analysis algorithms are inaccurate and can be discriminatory when applied to people of color. Over Read More

By:
On:
In: Safiya Noble
Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

Happy Black History Month! (originally published February 2020) by S.E. Hackney On Thursday, January 23rd, Dr. Safiya Noble spoke to an overflowing room of students, faculty, and community members about her best-selling book Algorithms of Oppression. The thesis of the book, and of Dr. Noble’s talk, is that not only racism is actually built in to the search algorithms which we use to navigate the internet, but that the big players of the internet (Google specifically) actually profit off of that racism by tokenizing the identities of people of color. It does this by associating identity phrases such as “black girls” or “phillipina” with the sites with the most streamlined (aka profitable) SEO, which is often pornography. This is a system of classification explicitly based on the centering of the white experience and and othering of Black people and other people of color. However, as Dr. Noble spoke about in her talk, tweaking a search result or two to avoid offense doesn’t actually solve a systemic problem — one where white voices are treated as the norm, and others eventually become reduced to SEO tags to be bought and sold. This idea played out recently in Barnes & Noble’s miss guided Black History Month project, where public domain books where the race of the protagonist is not specified (determined by algorithm) have new cover art created for them, depicting the characters as People of Color. Rod Faulkner, who first brought this issue to widespread attention describes it as “literary blackface,” and points out, “Slapping illustrations of Black versions Read More

By:
On:
In: Sandra González-Bailón
Tagged: , , , , ,

“What’s going on behind the analogies”– Sandra González-Bailón Outcomes are not always intentional. We trigger anticipated and unforeseen things with our actions. The “invisible hand” is consequential, known only through its effects. Like contagion processes, our actions are enmeshed in interrelated networks. These are some of the metaphors discussed by Sandra González-Bailón in her research on metaphorical thinking, social processes, and communication structures. She engages head-on with the challenges and affordances of digital realities- using data to learn about or “decode” aspects of social life. “Analogies help make creative connections; but they can also draw pictures of the world that are too coarse-grained for any useful purpose.” (29, Decoding the Social World) Polar area diagram by Florence Nightingale published in Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army and sent to Queen Victoria in 1858.  Models and metaphors are helpful for human cognition and communication, it seems unlikely that they can (or should) be avoided. The role of metaphors and other modes of abstraction are sorts of “black boxes” that are convenient for communication. We humans think with them, but they do shape our view of reality. “The language of argument is not poetic, fanciful, or rhetorical; it is literal. We talk about arguments that way because we conceive of them that way — and we act according to the way we conceive of things.” (pg. 5, Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By) Perhaps other metaphors might be more productive — other models may work better than their forerunners. Read More