Community + Museum: Guidelines for Collaboration

The Community and Museum collaboration guidelines were developed over a three-year period of collaboration between Native and non-Native museum professionals, cultural leaders and artists. The guidelines are intended as a resource for community members who are working in collaboration with museums. This is not a set of rules; instead, it offers ideas to consider when working with museums.

Your work with a museum might consist of viewing the collections to learn what the museum has from your community; sharing information about items from your community that are part of a museum’s collection; helping to develop museum exhibits; or if you are an artist, you might use a museum’s collections for artistic inspiration. These are just a few of the ways you might engage with a museum.

“Home | Community + Museum.” n.d. Community + Museum Guidelines for Collaboration. Accessed May 21, 2018. https://sarweb.org/guidelinesforcollaboration/index.html.

Consider the Boolean: The Challenge of Using Binary Data Structures in a Complicated World / Jacob Harris

I generally prefer to write about big picture subjects for my Learning pieces at Source. But today, let’s start from something small that illuminates the way even simple choices affect what we can represent and the stories we can tell. Let’s talk about the most basic datatype we often build our databases from: Boolean fields.

Harris, Jacob. 2015. “Consider the Boolean: The Challenge of Using Binary Data Structures in a Complicated World.” Source (blog). February 18, 2015. https://source.opennews.org/articles/consider-boolean/.

How We Analyzed the COMPAS Recidivism Algorithm / Mattu Larson and Angwin Kirchner

We set out to assess one of the commercial tools made by Northpointe, Inc. to discover the underlying accuracy of their recidivism algorithm and to test whether the algorithm was biased against certain groups.

Larson, Jeff, Surya Mattu, Lauren Kirchner, and Julia Angwin. 2016. “How We Analyzed the COMPAS Recidivism Algorithm.” ProPublica (blog). May 23, 2016. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compas-recidivism-algorithm.

Finding Gender-Inclusiveness Software Issues with GenderMag: A Field Investigation

Gender inclusiveness in computing settings is receiving a lot of attention, but one potentially critical factor has mostly been overlooked—software itself. To help close this gap, we recently created GenderMag, a systematic inspection method to enable software practitioners to evaluate their software for issues of gender-inclusiveness. In this paper, we present the first real-world investigation of software practitioners‘ ability to identify gender-inclusiveness issues in software they create/maintain using this method. Our investigation was a multiple-case field study of software teams at three major U.S. technology organizations. The results were that, using GenderMag to evaluate software, these software practitioners identified a surprisingly high number of gender-inclusiveness issues: 25% of the software features they evaluated had gender-inclusiveness issues.

Burnett, Margaret, Anicia Peters, Charles Hill, and Noha Elarief. 2016. “Finding Gender-Inclusiveness Software Issues with GenderMag: A Field Investigation.” In , 2586–98. ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858274.

Critical technical practice as a methodology for values in design

Critical Technical Practice (CTP) is an approach to identifying and altering philosophical assumptions underlying technical practice. In this paper, we propose CTP as a useful method for developing value-sensitive design, complementing existing ethics-based approaches in HCI. CTP, originally proposed by Phil Agre, tightly binds technology development (as practiced in computer science) with critical reflection (as practiced in critical studies and design research), thereby uncovering and altering hidden values and assumptions in technology design. HCI, due to its interdisciplinary constitution and reflective nature, is a particularly fruitful domain for critical technical practice. We demonstrate through four case studies how critical technical practice supports the identification of values underlying design as well as the development of concrete technical alternatives.

Boehner, K., David, S., Kaye, J., & Sengers, P. (2005). Critical technical practice as a methodology for values in design. In CHI 2005 Workshop on quality, values, and choices.

Toward a Critical Technical Practice / Philip Agre

A foundational article in both Artificial Intelligence and critical technical practice, containing a powerful theoretical framework for thinking about the ways that human assumptions and bias enter programming decisions at even the most basic level.

“A critical technical practice will, at least for the foreseeable future, require a split identity — one foot planted in the craft work of design and the other foot planted in the reflexive work of critique. Successfully spanning these borderlands, bridging the disparate sites of practice that computer work brings uncomfortably together, will require a historical understanding of the institutions and methods of the field, and it will draw on this understanding as a resource in choosing problems, evaluating solutions, diagnosing difficulties, and motivating alternative proposals. More concretely, it will require a praxis of daily work: forms of language, career strategies, and social networks that support the exploration of alternative work practices that will inevitably seem strange to insiders and outsiders alike.”

Agre, Philip E. 1997. “Toward a Critical Technical Practice.” In Bridging the Great Divide: Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work, edited by Geof Bowker, Les Gasser, Leigh Star, and Bill Turner, Open Access pre-print. Erlbaum. http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/critical.html.