READING PRESENTATION - BIAS

by tairan hao

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SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS

THE ORIGIN OF RACIAL CLASSIFICATION

18, 19 centuries, europeans began to construct an imagined communities. This mental image share a general will or a common national soul, was made by the expansion of print culture, which gives wide access to a common literary tradition. Classification hold the power biases of those who are able to propagate such systems.

Print culture accelerate the need for information classification schemes.

Traces of previous works defining the classification of native peoples as savage and claims about europeans as the superior races, based on prior notions of peoples and nations, began to emerge and be codified in 18th century.

19 century, instead of culture differences, it became biological, which were codified to deny rights to property ownership and citizenship.

What are the distinguishing data markers that define information about racialized people and women in US?

What have been missing from the field of information science, and to a lesser degree library science, are the issues of representation that are most often researched in the fields of African American studies, gender studies, communications and digital media studies.

In order to understand how racial and gender representation in each engine express the bias, an overview of historical environment is needed.

A SHORT HISTORY OF MISREPRESENTATION IN CLASSIFYING PEOPLE

Those who have the power to design systems - classification or technical - hold the ability to prioritize hierarchical schemes that privilege certain types of information over others.

Library of congress subject headings - foundational, authoritative framework for categorizing information in libraries in U.S.(First appeared 60 years ago).

Racism has been the fundamental organizing point of view in the LCSH.

Eventually LCSH abolished labels such as “yellow peril” and “jewish question”, changed “race question” to “race relation”.

The problem of bias in classification can be linked to the nature of classification as a social construct. It reflects the same biases as the culture that creates it.

Classifications reflect the philosophical and ideological presumptions of dominant cultures over subordinate cultures or groups.

For example, in Dewey Decimal Classification system, over 80 percent of its religion section is devoted exclusively to Christianity, even though there are greater numbers of other religious texts and literature

Ordering of information provided in classification schemes “tends to reflect the most mainstream version of these relationships” because classificatory structures are developed by the most powerful discourses in a society.

The most mainstream controlling regimes in society will privilege themselves and diminish all others in the organization of what constitutes legitimate knowledge.

When we inherit privilege, it is based on a massive knowledge regime that foregrounds the structural inequalities of the past, buttressed by vast stores of texts, images, and sounds saved in archives, museums and libraries.

Knowledge management reflects the same social biases that exist in society, because human are the epicenter of information curation.

These practices of the past are part of present, and only committed and protracted investments in repairing knowledge stores to reflect all communities can cause a shift toward equality and inclusion in the future. This includes reconciling our brutal past rather than obscuring or minimizing it. People have to confront histories and reconstitute libraries and museums toward reconciliation and reparation.

SEARCH ENGINES

Cultural metaphors are profoundly represented in the notions of “jewish question” or the “race question.” These subject headings suggest both an answer and a point of view from which the problems of jews and race are presupposed.

It is here that the context and point of view of library people and information science professionals who are responsible for framing people and communities as problems and questions is important.

In the case of google, since it is a commercial enterprise, the discussions about its similar information practices are situated under the auspices of free speech and protected corporate speech, rather than being posited as an information resource that is working in the public domain, much like a library.

In the cases of searching engines, the social context and histories of exploitation or objectification are not taken into explicit consideration - rather, they are disavowed.

The problems of racial representation and racism are deeply connected to words and images and that a racist worldview is embedded in cataloging practices that serve to bolster the image and domination of western values and people.

SEARCH AS A SOURCE OF REALITY

The search interface on the screen presents an information reality, while the operations are rendered increasingly invisible.

The digital interface is a material reality structuring a discourse, embedded with historical relations, working often under the auspices of ludic capitalism, where a kind of playful engagement of labor is masked in vital digital media platforms such as google.

Search not only present pages but structure knowledge, and result retrieved in a commercial search engine create their own particular material reality.

Web interface is a transitional format from previous media forms.

Google is not simply a harmless portal, it is a creation of commercial processes that are deeply rooted in social and historical production and organization process.

PROVIDING CONTEXT FOR INFORMATION ABOUT PEOPLE

There is a relationship between information and users that is dependent on human understanding.

Information provided to a user is deeply contextualized and stands within a frame of reference.

Information must be treated in a context.

The domain of information science is the transmission of the universe of human knowledge in recorded form, centering on manipulation of information, rather than knowing information.

This foregrounds the ways that representation in search engines are decontextualized in one specific type of information-retrieval process, particularly for groups whose images, identities and social histories are framed through forms of systemic domination. Although there is a long historical context for addressing categorizations, the impact of learning from these tradition has not been fully realized.

Whether human beings believe that the information delivered in search is relevant has consistently been the basis of judgment about information quality, but what is under discussed is that retrieval of information in commercial platform such as web-based search engines is not unique to the individual searcher.

A web-based search engine does not know who a user is, and it is not customizing everything to our personal and political tastes, although it is aggregating us to people it thinks are similar to us on the basis of what is known through our digital traces.

FINDING CULTURALLY SITUATED INFORMATION ON THE WEB

Responses to the kinds of problematic biases in large commercial search engines are part of the growing motivation behind a host of culturally situated search engines that are emerging.

BLACKBIRDHOME.com designed to help surface content of greater relevance to African Americans.

Identity-focused websites are emerging to prioritize the interests of specific communities on the basis of the human-curated practices of the past and can be seen in search engines.

One of the fundamental challenges for these culturally situated search engines is the way in which they make visible the contradictions and biases in search engines.

Though there is a demand for culturally relevant internet growing that will help surface content of interest to black people, its value works against norms on the web, making it less desirable.

REPRODUCING SOCIAL RELATIONS THROUGH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES

Online information and content available in search is also structured systemically by the infusion of advertising revenue and the surveillance of user searches, which the subjects of such practices have very little ability to reshape of reformulate.

Lack of attention to the current exploitative nature of online keyword searches only further entrenches the problematic identities in the media for women of color, identities that have been contested since the advent of commercial media such as broadcast, print and radio.

Internet search platforms and technology companies could allow for greater expression and serve as a democratizing tool for the public. This is rendered impossible with the current commercial practices.

What we need are public search engine alternatives, united with public-interest journalism and librarianship, to ensure that the public has access to the highest quality information available.