• HC Visitor
Skip to content
Information Ecosystems
Information Ecosystems

Information, Power, and Consequences

Primary Navigation Menu
Menu
  • InfoEco Podcast
  • InfoEco Blog
  • InfoEco Cookbook
    • About
    • Curricular Pathways
    • Cookbook Modules

black history month

Augmented Reality as a New Reality: How AR is Changing Monuments, Memorials, and Information Retrieval

2021-02-22
By: Jane Rohrer
On: February 22, 2021
In: Uncategorized
Tagged: anti-racism, archives, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, Big Data, black history month, history, racism, virtual reality

When you read the phrase “Augmented Reality,” your mind might turn to something like Pokémon GO or the popular running app, Zombies, Run! In both cases, the user experiences a game that, while based in a real-world environment, includes computer-generated perceptual information—most typically visuals and sounds, but including haptic modalities, too. A Pokémon, GO player might make their way down a very real hiking trail or across a downtown street while their phones display that very same location—the only difference being a virtual Growlithe waiting to be captured atop a tree stump or storm drain. Augmented Reality is a term that’s been in the mainstream public consciousness for decades now; for example, AR in the form of what’s known as Heads Up Display (HUD), which allows airplane pilots to read information on a clear glass screen atop the windshield itself (rather than a separate display), has been standard in aviation for decades now. But only very recently, alongside the rise of smartphones and Artificial Intelligence, has the true potentiality of AR become a mainstream, everyday reality—allowing it to flourish most popularly in entertainment, fitness, and marketing and commerce. Pokémon GO and Zombies, Run! have been around since 2016 and 2012 respectively, and in that time a whole world of Augmented Reality experiences have popped up. Alongside the video games and fitness experiences, there’s the Warby Parker app that allows users to virtually try on glasses, an IKEA app that places virtual furniture into users’ homes, and Snapchat filters that turned a Footlocker advertisement into a 3D Read More

Racism, Algorithms, and Blackness in Medicine: A Reading List for Black History Month During a Pandemic

2021-02-17
By: Jane Rohrer
On: February 17, 2021
In: Uncategorized
Tagged: Algorithms, Big Data, black history month, diversity, medical bias, medicine, racism

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

Racism and Representation in Information Retrieval

2020-01-23
By: SE (Shack) Hackney
On: January 23, 2020
In: Safiya Noble
Tagged: Algorithms, archives, black history month, Data, digital humanities, diversity, Information Ecosystems, Libraries, racism

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

Invited Speakers

  • Annette Vee
  • Bill Rankin
  • Chris Gilliard
  • Christopher Phillips
  • Colin Allen
  • Edouard Machery
  • Jo Guldi
  • Lara Putnam
  • Lyneise Williams
  • Mario Khreiche
  • Matthew Edney
  • Matthew Jones
  • Matthew Lincoln
  • Melissa Finucane
  • Richard Marciano
  • Sabina Leonelli
  • Safiya Noble
  • Sandra González-Bailón
  • Ted Underwood
  • Uncategorized

Recent Posts

  • EdTech Automation and Learning Management
  • The Changing Face of Literacy in the 21st Century: Dr. Annette Vee Visits the Podcast
  • Dr. Lara Putnam Visits the Podcast: Web-Based Research, Political Organizing, and Getting to Know Our Neighbors
  • Chris Gilliard Visits the Podcast: Digital Redlining, Tech Policy, and What it Really Means to Have Privacy Online
  • Numbers Have History

Recent Comments

    Archives

    • June 2021
    • April 2021
    • March 2021
    • February 2021
    • January 2021
    • December 2020
    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • May 2020
    • March 2020
    • February 2020
    • January 2020
    • December 2019
    • November 2019
    • October 2019
    • September 2019

    Categories

    • Annette Vee
    • Bill Rankin
    • Chris Gilliard
    • Christopher Phillips
    • Colin Allen
    • Edouard Machery
    • Jo Guldi
    • Lara Putnam
    • Lyneise Williams
    • Mario Khreiche
    • Matthew Edney
    • Matthew Jones
    • Matthew Lincoln
    • Melissa Finucane
    • Richard Marciano
    • Sabina Leonelli
    • Safiya Noble
    • Sandra González-Bailón
    • Ted Underwood
    • Uncategorized

    Meta

    • Log in
    • Entries feed
    • Comments feed
    • WordPress.org

    Tags

    Algorithms Amazon archives artificial intelligence augmented reality automation Big Data Bill Rankin black history month burnout cartography Curation Darwin Data data pipelines data visualization digital humanities digitization diversity Education election maps history history of science Information Information Ecosystems Information Science Libraries LMS maps mechanization medical bias medicine Museums newspaper Open Data Philosophy of Science privacy racism risk social science solutions journalism Ted Underwood Topic modeling Uber virtual reality

    Menu

    • InfoEco Podcast
    • InfoEco Blog
    • InfoEco Cookbook
      • About
      • Curricular Pathways
      • Cookbook Modules

    Search This Site

    Search

    The Information Ecosystems Team 2023

    This site is part of Humanities Commons. Explore other sites on this network or register to build your own.
    Terms of ServicePrivacy PolicyGuidelines for Participation