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Information Science

Data, Desert Islands, and Digital Dark Ages: Richard Marciano on Records and Data Management

2020-10-31
By: Erin O'Rourke
On: October 31, 2020
In: Richard Marciano
Tagged: Data, Education, Information Science, Records Management, Richard Marciano

On November 1, Dr. Richard Marciano, a professor at the University of Maryland, asked Sawyer Seminar participants, “If you were on an academic desert island, what data would you bring with you?” After hearing about his career, which included working as a computational environmental scientist and at a supercomputing center, studying electrical engineering, and most recently, working as a professor and director of data curation initiatives at UMD, it was clear that Dr. Marciano has had to make decisions like this one numerous times. He discussed moving between jobs or even universities and bringing relevant data sets and sources with him into these roles. Consequently, he lends a fascinating perspective to data curation and records management, as well as pedagogy in these fields. Dr. Marciano first came to UMD when they were seeking professors to transform their Masters in Library and Information Science program and change the way students were trained in digital and computational methods. To balance the fact that he comes from a science background, he intentionally built teams with members from archival and library backgrounds. One of the courses he introduced was an eight-week intensive program across disciplines that uses digital methods to work through data problems. In teaching, he uses tools like Jupyter notebooks to create readable, touchable, interactive environments and learning spaces that others can build upon. In addition, he suggests universities create certificate programs for continuing education in digital methods for humanities and archival professions to keep up with current trends. For example, major curators of data like the National Read More

It’s not “just an algorithm”

2020-01-23
By: Erin O'Rourke
On: January 23, 2020
In: Safiya Noble
Tagged: Algorithms, Data, Information Science, Safiya Umoja Noble

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

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