Advocacy by Design: Moving Between Theory & Practice / Purdom Lindblad
Advocacy by Design (AbD) is a design framework for critical engagement centered on advocacy. AbD advocates for transparency, openness, polyvocalism, stewardship, and how to achieve these goals. In order to best fulfill these goals, the presentation suggests that libraries take part in collaborative projects. For more information on collaborative projects and the importance of collaboration…
Read MoreAgainst Cleaning / Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz
[T]here is not one single understanding of what “data cleaning” means. Many times the specifics of “data cleaning” are not described anywhere but reside in the general professional practices, materials, personal histories, and tools of the researchers. That we employ obscuring language like “data cleaning” should be a strong invitation to scrutinize, perhaps reimagine, and…
Read More“Free as in sexist?” Free Culture and the Gender Gap / Joseph Reagle
This article is particularly valuable when discussing stereotypical and default modes of collaboration and communication within technical communities. Reagle focuses particularly on gender, but the framework laid out here also has resonance for technical development involving other underrepresented communities. “Despite the values of freedom and openness, the free culture movement’s gender balance is as skewed…
Read MoreON NONSCALABILITY: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales / Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
This heavily theoretical piece provides a vital counterweight to the pressure for “scale” in technological projects, and can give cultural heritage project managers a useful vocabulary for questioning demands to follow tightly regulated software development processes when it is not appropriate for community-driven, humanistic work. Tsing shows that while “scalability” is defined as projects that…
Read MoreConsider 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.…
Read MorePrototype Theory: An Alternative Concept Theory for Categorizing Sex and Gender? / Melodie J. Fox
This article explores prototype theory as an alternative to classical theories of classification. This article points to other, more fine-grained methods for classification than traditional systems with rigid boundaries and hierarchies. While this article does not delve into the technical systems needed to implement prototype theory, it is a very useful foundation for discussions on…
Read MoreDesign Justice in Action
Design Justice in Action (2017) rethinks design processes, centers people who are normally marginalized by design, and uses collaborative, creative practices to address the deepest challenges our communities face.
Read MoreFinding 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…
Read MoreCritical 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…
Read MoreToward 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…
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