Content Moderation and the User Experience

Posted on 1 CommentPosted in Unit 5

The past week of discussions has been incredibly timely; in our current events, it is incredibly important to understand and analyze the ways in which content moderation can be manipulated to craft a specific narrative. As humans work behind the scenes to code and use algorithms that generate public content, I wonder how might this […]

Social Media, Content Moderation, and Agency

Posted on 1 CommentPosted in Unit 5

A couple of years ago, a friend shared with me this article by former Google design ethicist, Tristan Harris. Although it is somewhat alarmist with regard to social media, as is his website advocating for more “human” tech design, the readings and discussion last week on platforms and content moderation that called into question the […]

False Flags – Why content moderation can’t solve Section 230

Posted on 1 CommentPosted in Unit 5

In the paper Platforms are Not Intermediaries (2018), Gillespie carefully outlines the challenges in regulating online platforms that are both conduits of communication and content curators. He suggested a number of actions for balancing the power and freedom that social media platforms and internet service providers (ISPs) have with public obligations. These include an increase […]

Future Historians’ Data…

Posted on 1 CommentPosted in Unit 5

For this post, I would like to focus on Mary Gray’s video on the hidden cost of ghost work in algorithms. As she points out, even with machine learning techniques, there are still humans who perform the new work upon which artificial intelligence algorithms rely. This takes on the form of data entry, data labeling, […]

Online Labor and Covid19

Posted on 1 CommentPosted in Unit 5

I’m musing today about the way that Covid19 will ultimately affect the economy and how technology, and automation, will play a part in that. Part of what scares me about shutting down all “non-essential” business (though I completely agree that we should do this because human life > money) is that what is deemed “non-essential” […]

World Historical Gazetteer and Recogito II

Posted on Leave a commentPosted in Unit 4b

In our assigned readings, our discussions in class, and my work with the World Historical Gazetteer and Recogito, I was most interested in relationships of space and place and the ways in which place names might reflect these relationships. In my previous blog post, I described my search for “London” using the World Historical Gazetteer, […]

A Convergence of Worlds

Posted on Leave a commentPosted in Unit 4b

Curry writes that “against the background of this rereading of the concepts of space and place, much that occurs today turns out to be a matter of place, not space. In fact, the concept of space typically operates either metaphorically or reflectively (680). Given Curry’s discussion of the terms “place” seem to be temporal geographical […]