Credentials: I’m an assistant professor in information science. PhD/JD. I research and teach in the areas of technology ethics and governance, online communities/social media, and transformative fandom.

most recent videos

A feud in wolf-kink erotica raises deep legal question | Into the Omegaverse | Addison Cain’s lawyer emailed me | Fair use in the omegaverse

YouTube video: what to do as an undergrad if you want a PhD

advice for PhD applicants (YouTube playlist)

TikTok-based Online Communities class
the 60-second at a time version of my class – read/watch along!

List of books about tech ethics & social impact

my favorite book rec video: with thanks to penelope scott

Algorithms of Oppression (Safiya Noble); The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff); Race After Technology (Ruha Benjamin); Weapons of Math Destruction (Cathy O’Neil); Automating Inequality (Virginia Eubanks); Technically Wrong (Sara Wachter-Boettcher; Ghost Work (Mary Gray & Siddharth Suri); Design Justice (Sasha Constanza-Chock); Data Feminism (Catherine D’Ignazio & Lauren Klein); Custodians of the Internet (Tarleton Gillespie); Antisocial Media (Siva Vaidhyanathan); Black Software (Charlton D. McIlwain); Behind the Screen (Sarah Roberts); Invisible Women (Caroline Criado Perez); Programmed Inequality (Mar Hicks); This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things (Whitney Phillips); Calling Bullshit (Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West); The Charisma Machine (Morgan Ames); The Black Box Society (Frank Pasquale); Intersectional Tech (Kishoanna Gray); Artificial Unintelligence (Meredith Broussard); Coding Freedom (Gabriella Colman); Hello World (Hannah Frye)

sources and info for older videos

AI bias & policing/justice system

Machine Bias: Risk Assessments in Criminal Sentencing (ProPublica)

Dressel, Julia, and Hany Farid. “The accuracy, fairness, and limits of predicting recidivism.” Science advances 4, no. 1 (2018): eaao5580.

Washington, Anne L. “How to argue with an algorithm: Lessons from the COMPAS-ProPublica debate.” Colo. Tech. LJ 17 (2018): 131.

Kahn, Kimberly Barsamian, and Karin D. Martin. “The Social Psychology of Racially Biased Policing: Evidence-Based Policy Responses.” Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7, no. 2 (2020): 107-114.

AI bias examples

VIDEOS: Algorithms are not neutral | AI, AOC & a bikini| Why AI didn’t hire women | Hiring has always been racist | Is AI naughty or nice? | How do machines learn? | Definitely white men. | Bias & black box algoithms

The Apple Card Didn’t ‘See’ Gender—and That’s the Problem (WIRED)

Williams, Betsy Anne, Catherine F. Brooks, and Yotam Shmargad. “How algorithms discriminate based on data they lack: Challenges, solutions, and policy implications.” Journal of Information Policy 8 (2018): 78-115.

Companies are on the hook if their hiring algorithms are biased (Quartz) | Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women (Reuters)

All the Ways Hiring Algorithms Can Introduce Bias (Harvard Business Review) – based on Help Wanted: An Examination of Hiring Algorithms, Equity, and Bias

Raghavan, Manish, Solon Barocas, Jon Kleinberg, and Karen Levy. “Mitigating bias in algorithmic hiring: Evaluating claims and practices.” In Proceedings of the 2020 conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, pp. 469-481. 2020.

Bertrand, Marianne, and Sendhil Mullainathan. “Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination.” American economic review 94, no. 4 (2004): 991-1013. [And here’s a simplified explainer.]

Quillian, Lincoln, Devah Pager, Ole Hexel, and Arnfinn H. Midtbøen. “Meta-analysis of field experiments shows no change in racial discrimination in hiring over time.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 41 (2017): 10870-10875.

Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. “Gender shades: Intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification.” In Conference on fairness, accountability and transparency, pp. 77-91. PMLR, 2018.

Image Representations Learned With Unsupervised Pre-Training Contain Human-like Biases (FaaCT 2021) [Press: What a picture of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a bikini tells us about the disturbing future of AI (The Guardian)]

List of novels about video games

Warcross (Marie Lu), Don’t Read the Comments (Eric Smith), Slay (Brittney Morris), For the Win (Cory Doctorow), Reamde (Neal Stephenson), Dragon Ops (Mari Mancusi), Ready Player One (Ernest Cline)

List of science fiction to make you think about ethics

Autonomous (Annalee Newitz), Axiom’s End (Lindsay Ellis), Rosewater (Tade Thompson), Little Brother (Cory Doctorow), Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood), After On (Rob Reid), Binti (Nnedi Okorafor), Ready Player One (Ernest Cline), Nexus (Ramez Naam), The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu), Warcross (Marie Lu), Ancillary Justice (Ann Leckie), All Systems Red (Martha Wells), War Girls (Tochi Onyebuchi), The Circle (David Eggers), Infomocracy (Malka Older), Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson), Jurassic Park (Michael Crichton)

Where did women in CS go?

VIDEOS: one | two | three

Digest of Education Statistics (1970 – 2010)

2019 Taulbee Survey on undergrad CS enrollment

Dolls Who Code (Slate) – op ed by me that includes the graph in the video

Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher

The Secret History of Women in Coding (New York Times)

accessibility and captioning

VIDEO: the research case for captions

Shiver, Brent N., and Rosalee J. Wolfe. “Evaluating alternatives for better deaf accessibility to selected web-based multimedia.” In Proceedings of the 17th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on computers & accessibility, pp. 231-238. 2015.

Gernsbacher, Morton Ann. “Video captions benefit everyone.” Policy insights from the behavioral and brain sciences 2, no. 1 (2015): 195-202.

Henry, Shawn Lawton, Shadi Abou-Zahra, and Judy Brewer. “The role of accessibility in a universal web.” In Proceedings of the 11th Web for all Conference, pp. 1-4. 2014.

miscellaneous

Socioeconomic Roots of Academic Faculty by Morgan et al