Algorithms of Oppression

Algorithms of Oppression PDF Author: Safiya Umoja Noble
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479837245
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Acknowledgments -- Introduction: the power of algorithms -- A society, searching -- Searching for Black girls -- Searching for people and communities -- Searching for protections from search engines -- The future of knowledge in the public -- The future of information culture -- Conclusion: algorithms of oppression -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the author

Algorithms of Oppression

Algorithms of Oppression PDF Author: Safiya Umoja Noble
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479837245
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
Acknowledgments -- Introduction: the power of algorithms -- A society, searching -- Searching for Black girls -- Searching for people and communities -- Searching for protections from search engines -- The future of knowledge in the public -- The future of information culture -- Conclusion: algorithms of oppression -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the author

Pattern Discrimination

Pattern Discrimination PDF Author: Clemens Apprich
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452959277
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
How do “human” prejudices reemerge in algorithmic cultures allegedly devised to be blind to them? How do “human” prejudices reemerge in algorithmic cultures allegedly devised to be blind to them? To answer this question, this book investigates a fundamental axiom in computer science: pattern discrimination. By imposing identity on input data, in order to filter—that is, to discriminate—signals from noise, patterns become a highly political issue. Algorithmic identity politics reinstate old forms of social segregation, such as class, race, and gender, through defaults and paradigmatic assumptions about the homophilic nature of connection. Instead of providing a more “objective” basis of decision making, machine-learning algorithms deepen bias and further inscribe inequality into media. Yet pattern discrimination is an essential part of human—and nonhuman—cognition. Bringing together media thinkers and artists from the United States and Germany, this volume asks the urgent questions: How can we discriminate without being discriminatory? How can we filter information out of data without reinserting racist, sexist, and classist beliefs? How can we queer homophilic tendencies within digital cultures?

Race After Technology

Race After Technology PDF Author: Ruha Benjamin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509526439
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture. Visit the book's free Discussion Guide: www.dropbox.com

White Bound

White Bound PDF Author: Matthew Hughey
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804783314
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Discussions of race are inevitably fraught with tension, both in opinion and positioning. Too frequently, debates are framed as clear points of opposition—us versus them. And when considering white racial identity, a split between progressive movements and a neoconservative backlash is all too frequently assumed. Taken at face value, it would seem that whites are splintering into antagonistic groups, with differing worldviews, values, and ideological stances. White Bound investigates these dividing lines, questioning the very notion of a fracturing whiteness, and in so doing offers a unique view of white racial identity. Matthew Hughey spent over a year attending the meetings, reading the literature, and interviewing members of two white organizations—a white nationalist group and a white antiracist group. Though he found immediate political differences, he observed surprising similarities. Both groups make meaning of whiteness through a reliance on similar racist and reactionary stories and worldviews. On the whole, this book puts abstract beliefs and theoretical projection about the supposed fracturing of whiteness into relief against the realities of two groups never before directly compared with this much breadth and depth. By examining the similarities and differences between seemingly antithetical white groups, we see not just the many ways of being white, but how these actors make meaning of whiteness in ways that collectively reproduce both white identity and, ultimately, white supremacy.

Research Ethics in the Real World

Research Ethics in the Real World PDF Author: Helen Kara
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 144734474X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Research ethics and integrity are growing in importance as academics face increasing pressure to win grants and publish, and universities promote themselves in the competitive HE market. Research Ethics in the Real World is the first book to highlight the links between research ethics and individual, social, professional, institutional, and political ethics. Drawing on Indigenous and Euro-Western research traditions, Helen Kara considers all stages of the research process, from the formulation of a research question to aftercare for participants, data and findings. She argues that knowledge of both ethical approaches is helpful for researchers working in either paradigm. Students, academics, and research ethics experts from around the world contribute real-world perspectives on navigating and managing ethics in practice. Research Ethics in the Real World provides guidance for quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods researchers from all disciplines about how to act ethically throughout your research work. This book is invaluable in supporting teachers of research ethics to design and deliver effective courses.

Algorithms and the End of Politics

Algorithms and the End of Politics PDF Author: Timcke, Scott
Publisher: Bristol University Press
ISBN: 1529215315
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
As the US contends with issues of populism and de-democratization, this timely study considers the impacts of digital technologies on the country’s politics and society. Timcke provides a Marxist analysis of the rise of digital media, social networks and technology giants like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. He looks at the impact of these new platforms and technologies on their users who have made them among the most valuable firms in the world. Offering bold new thinking across data politics and digital and economic sociology, this is a powerful demonstration of how algorithms have come to shape everyday life and political legitimacy in the US and beyond.

Automating Inequality

Automating Inequality PDF Author: Virginia Eubanks
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1466885963
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
WINNER: The 2019 Lillian Smith Book Award, 2018 McGannon Center Book Prize, and shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice Astra Taylor, author of The People's Platform: "The single most important book about technology you will read this year." Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: "A must-read." A powerful investigative look at data-based discrimination?and how technology affects civil and human rights and economic equity The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years—because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect. Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems—rather than humans—control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile. The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values. This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely.

Real Black

Real Black PDF Author: John L. Jackson Jr.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226390017
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
New York's urban neighborhoods are full of young would-be emcees who aspire to "keep it real" and restaurants like Sylvia's famous soul food eatery that offer a taste of "authentic" black culture. In these and other venues, authenticity is considered the best way to distinguish the real from the phony, the genuine from the fake. But in Real Black, John L. Jackson Jr. proposes a new model for thinking about these issues--racial sincerity. Jackson argues that authenticity caricatures identity as something imposed on people, imprisoning them within stereotypes--turning them into racial objects and inanimate things, instead of living, breathing human beings. Contending that such assumptions deny people agency--not to mention humanity--in their search for identity, Jackson counterposes sincerity, an internal and more productive analytical model for thinking about race. Moving in and around Harlem and Brooklyn, Jackson offers a kaleidoscope of subjects and stories that directly and indirectly address how race is negotiated in today's world--including tales of name-changing hip-hop emcees, book-vending numerologists, urban conspiracy theorists, corrupt police officers, mixed-race neo-Nazis, and high-school gospel choirs forbidden to catch the Holy Ghost. Enlisting "Anthroman," his cape-crusading critical alter ego, Jackson records and retells these interconnected sagas in virtuosic detail and, in the process, shows us how race is defined and debated, imposed and confounded every single day.

The Hollywood Jim Crow

The Hollywood Jim Crow PDF Author: Maryann Erigha
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479886645
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The story of racial hierarchy in the American film industry The #OscarsSoWhite campaign, and the content of the leaked Sony emails which revealed, among many other things, that a powerful Hollywood insider didn’t believe that Denzel Washington could “open” a western genre film, provide glaring evidence that the opportunities for people of color in Hollywood are limited. In The Hollywood Jim Crow, Maryann Erigha tells the story of inequality, looking at the practices and biases that limit the production and circulation of movies directed by racial minorities. She examines over 1,300 contemporary films, specifically focusing on directors, to show the key elements at work in maintaining “the Hollywood Jim Crow.” Unlike the Jim Crow era where ideas about innate racial inferiority and superiority were the grounds for segregation, Hollywood’s version tries to use economic and cultural explanations to justify the underrepresentation and stigmatization of Black filmmakers. Erigha exposes the key elements at work in maintaining Hollywood’s racial hierarchy, namely the relationship between genre and race, the ghettoization of Black directors to black films, and how Blackness is perceived by the Hollywood producers and studios who decide what gets made and who gets to make it. Erigha questions the notion that increased representation of African Americans behind the camera is the sole answer to the racial inequality gap. Instead, she suggests focusing on the obstacles to integration for African American film directors. Hollywood movies have an expansive reach and exert tremendous power in the national and global production, distribution, and exhibition of popular culture. The Hollywood Jim Crow fully dissects the racial inequality embedded in this industry, looking at alternative ways for African Americans to find success in Hollywood and suggesting how they can band together to forge their own career paths.

What Algorithms Want

What Algorithms Want PDF Author: Ed Finn
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262536048
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
The gap between theoretical ideas and messy reality, as seen in Neal Stephenson, Adam Smith, and Star Trek. We depend on—we believe in—algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execute a mathematical proof. It's as if we think of code as a magic spell, an incantation to reveal what we need to know and even what we want. Humans have always believed that certain invocations—the marriage vow, the shaman's curse—do not merely describe the world but make it. Computation casts a cultural shadow that is shaped by this long tradition of magical thinking. In this book, Ed Finn considers how the algorithm—in practical terms, “a method for solving a problem”—has its roots not only in mathematical logic but also in cybernetics, philosophy, and magical thinking. Finn argues that the algorithm deploys concepts from the idealized space of computation in a messy reality, with unpredictable and sometimes fascinating results. Drawing on sources that range from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash to Diderot's Encyclopédie, from Adam Smith to the Star Trek computer, Finn explores the gap between theoretical ideas and pragmatic instructions. He examines the development of intelligent assistants like Siri, the rise of algorithmic aesthetics at Netflix, Ian Bogost's satiric Facebook game Cow Clicker, and the revolutionary economics of Bitcoin. He describes Google's goal of anticipating our questions, Uber's cartoon maps and black box accounting, and what Facebook tells us about programmable value, among other things. If we want to understand the gap between abstraction and messy reality, Finn argues, we need to build a model of “algorithmic reading” and scholarship that attends to process, spearheading a new experimental humanities.