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Meet Author Dr.Safiya Noble ‘Algorithms of Oppression’
In our June AI Ethics Book Chat, we invited author and scholar Dr. Safiya Noble @SafiyaNoble to discuss their powerful book “Algorithms of Oppression.”
Mia Shah-Dand: Please tell us more about your first encounter with racism in search that inspired your powerful book?
Safiya Noble: to do research in this area. I spent a lot of time thinking about this in the context of CritLib while in a doctorate program @iSchoolUI and I was studying and learning from @lnakamur @AngharadValdivi and so many great scholars at Illinois. I had been critically looking at Google search because @sivavaid wrote the book that inspired me the most: https://ucpress.edu/book/9780520272897/the-googlization-of-everything and I was also influenced by the writings of @DocDre @halavais & wanted to put this digital media studies and info-sci in dialogue with Black feminists who had influenced me my whole life: Bell Hooks, Black Feminist Thought and, Angela Y. Davis.
I was finding lots of racist & sexist results in search. During that time, @DocDre said to me, “you should see what happens when you search for Black girls.” I did see. I saw again & again, and that became the leading example for my book and, I was thinking about the beautiful Black children in my life & how my girls were growing up in a world where their identities were…
