Student activists are to thank for the change

A new study shows that knowledge of government surveillance causes people to self-censor their dissenting opinions online.

"Tay" says she supports genocide and hates black people.

In FOAF it's a dang literal.

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning   Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble discusses her research into Google, a
technology commonly thought of as a public resource free from commercial
interest, and the ways in which it mediates public access to
information in biased ways and permits problematic racial and gender
misrepresentations.  Sponsored by the Douglas College Faculty Professional Development Committee.
 
Speaker bio
Safiya Umoja Noble is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education
and Information Studies at UCLA. Her research focuses on socio-cultural
informatics, and feminist, historical and political-economic
perspectives on computing platforms and software in the public interest.
Her research is at the intersection of transnational culture and
technology in the design and use of applications on the internet. She is
currently writing a book about Google and Information bias (forthcoming
from NYU Press).

Writings about libraries, technology, and the Web by Matthew Reidsma.

Architecture is politics: The power and the perils of systems design Andreas Orphanides NCSU Libraries A couple years ago I was teaching a Systems Analysis class, and one of my students said, Dre, I was thinking that systems designers are in a really powerful position, because the design of the s...

By Deen Freelon, Charlton D. McIlwain, and Meredith D. Clark | February 29, 2016 Download report PDF here (2.7 MB) The views expressed in this report are the authors’ alone and are not necessarily shared by the Spencer Foundation or the Center for Media and Social Impact.  IN 2014, A DEDICATED ACTIVIST MOVEMENT—Black Lives Matter (BLM)—ignited an […]

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

In this post I share the full text of a grant proposal to fund library user experience design for Native American students at my institution, Montana State University. I am publishing the proposal and licensing the text CC BY so that other libraries and universities will be able to reuse and adapt t

"Ridiculously optimistic" machine learning algorithm is "completely bullshit," says expert.

Today’s empires are born on the web, and exert tremendous power in the material world.

Queer book gets remade by publisher to be immensely less queer. Not cool.

The conceptual, practical, and ethical issues surrounding “big data” and data in general begin at the very moment of data collection…

In the waning months of the Bloomberg administration, I worked for a time in a New York City Hall data group within the Health and Human Services...