The program schedule will serve as the reading list for the Spring semester. Each session will consist of group discussion of the core materials. You may also choose to explore the optional materials, which may be discussed during the sessions. Supplemental materials are intended to build on the topics addressed in this program but will not be discussed. Please keep in mind that this program is meant to be self-directed – you may choose to skim, skip, or supplement these readings as needed.

This reading list is by no means comprehensive and is intended to serve as an entry point to the topic of AI in information seeking and discovery. Additional materials will be added to the Further Reading page for those who would like to continue to engage in this topic.

Session 1: Tuesday, February 9, 4PM

Theme: Context

Core:

• Zuboff, Shoshana. “August 9, 2011: Setting the Stage for Surveillance Capitalism.” In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.
• Head, Alison, Barbara Fister, and Margy MacMillan. “Executive Summary”. Information Literacy in the Age of Algorithms: Student Experiences with News and Information and the Need for Change. Project Information Literacy, January 15, 2020.

Optional:

• Metcalf, Jacob, Emanuel Moss, and danah boyd. “Owning Ethics: Corporate Logics, Silicon Valley, and the Institutionalization of Ethics.” Social Research 86, no. 2 (2019): 449–76.
• “Executive Summary.” In WIPO Technology Trends 2019 – Artificial Intelligence, 13-17. Geneva: World Intellectual Property Organization, 2019.

Supplemental:

• Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

Session 2: Wednesday, February 24, 12:00 PM

Theme: System Design

Core:

• Broussard, Meredith. “Hello, World” AND “Hello, AI”. In Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, 13-40. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2018.

• Costanza-Chock, Sasha. “Design Pedagogies: ‘There’s Something Wrong with This System!’” In Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020.

• Buolamwini, Joy. “How I’m Fighting Bias in Algorithms.” TEDxBeaconStreet, November 2016. (video)

Optional:

• Benjamin, Ruha. “Coded Exposure.” In Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, 97–226. Medford: Polity, 2019.

Supplemental:

• Everett, Anna. “The Revolution Will Be Digitized: Afrocentricity and the Digital Public Sphere.” Social Text 20, no. 2 (2002): 125–46.
• Jefferson, Brian Jordan. Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Session 3: Tuesday, March 9, 4PM

Theme: Data

Core:

• Klein, Lauren F., and Catherine D’Ignazio. “What Gets Counted Counts.” In Data Feminism, 97–124. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020.
• Taylor, Linnet, Gargi Sharma, Aaron Martin, and Shazade Jameson. “Introduction: What Does the COVID-19 Response Mean for Global Data Justice?” In Data Justice and COVID-19: Global Perspectives, 8–19. London: Meatspace Press, 2020. Additionally, select one Dispatch from a country of your choosing.

Optional:

• D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. “Data Feminism.” Just Infrastructures Speaker Series, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, February 24, 2021.
• Data 4 Black Lives. 2020. https://d4bl.org/.
• Data & Society. “Data & Society Research.” https://datasociety.net/research/. Pick one report to review.

Supplemental:

• Eubanks, Virginia. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018.

Session 4: Wednesday, March 31, 12 PM

Theme: Curation

Core:

• Pariser, Eli. “The Race for Relevance.” In The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think. New York: Penguin Press, 2011.
• Roberts, Sarah T. “Understanding Commercial Content Moderation.” In Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
• McIlwain, Charlton. “Introduction.” In Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter, 3–8. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Optional:

• Orlowski, Jeff. The Social Dilemma, 2020. (Netflix film – subscription required)

Supplemental:

• Brock, André L. Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures. New York: New York University Press, 2020.

Session 5: Tuesday, April 20, 4PM

Theme: Classification

Core:

• Noble, Safiya Umoja. “Searching for Protections from Search Engines” AND “Conclusion.” Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press, 2018.
• Jackson, Sarah J., Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles. “Visions of Black Feminism: #FastTailedGirls, #YouOKSis, #SayHerName.” In #Hashtagactivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice, 31–64. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020.
• Drabinski, Emily. “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction.” Library Quarterly 83, no. 2 (April 2013): 94–111.

Optional:

• Noble, Safiya Umoja, Ruha Benjamin, André L. Brock, and Charlton McIlwain. “Anti-Blackness & Technology.” University of California at Santa Barbara, November 18, 2020. (webinar)
• Baron, Jill E., and Sawyer Broadley. Change the Subject. Dartmouth Digital Library Program, 2019. (film)

Supplemental:

• Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.” In Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency, 81: 77–91. Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, 2018. (Select “Research Paper”)

Session 6: Wednesday, May 5, 12 PM

Theme: Discovery

Core:

• Reidsma, Matthew. “Library Discovery” AND “Bias in Library Discovery.” In Masked by Trust: Bias in Library Discovery. Sacramento: Litwin Books, 2019.
• Block, Sharon. “Erasure, Misrepresentation and Confusion: Investigating JSTOR Topics on Women’s and Race Histories.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 14, no. 1 (2020).
• Padilla, Thomas. “Responsible Operations: Data Science, Machine Learning, and AI in Libraries.” University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, October 20, 2020. (webinar)

Optional:

• Jo, Eun Seo, and Timnit Gebru. “Lessons from Archives: Strategies for Collecting Sociocultural Data in Machine Learning.” Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, January 27, 2020, 306–16.
• Lewis, Ben. Google and the World Brain. Media Education Foundation, 2014. (film)

Supplemental:

• Lee, Ben. “Newspaper Navigator: Reimagining Digitized Newspapers with Machine Learning.” Princeton University, May 15, 2020. (webinar)