What is the Culture, Computation, and Society Reading Group?
Computers are impacting all of our lives - let’s talk about it
The culture, computation, and society reading group was a student-led seminar that I co-organized and co-led with Adriana Knight from 2019-2021 at Swarthmore College. Comprised of students, staff, and faculty from across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, we felt very strongly that the reading group should actively seek out and include individuals who aren’t the stereotypical STEM major. To quote one of our publicity emails “This seminar is open to EVERYONE. Not just CS majors, not just CS students, but anyone who uses a computer (that’s you!).”
During our scheduled meetings, we mainly discussed readings in line with the group’s founding vision:
We pursue intersections between culture and computation, the qualitative and the quantitative, the humanistic and the digital through reading, talking, and coding
In addition to discussions, we occasionally had a sprinkling of interactive workshops, tutorials, and guest lecturers.
An Abridged Reading List
Race and Technology
- Abolish the #TechToPrisonPipeline, by the Coalition for Critical Technology
- Black Software, by Charlton D. McIlwain (subtitle: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter)
- Big Data’s Disparate Impact, by Baracos and Selbst
- Making Skin Visible through Liberatory Design, by Lorna Roth in Captivating Technology (Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life)
- Critical Race Theory for HCI, by Ogbonnaya-Ogburu et al
- Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence, by Mohamed et al
- Design Justice, by Sasha Costanza-Chock (subtitle: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need)
- Intersectionality: Race, Surveillance, and Tech and Its History with Cory Doctorow, Malkia Devich-Cyril (Media Justice) and Meredith Whittaker (AI Now)
- Machine Bias, by ProPublica
- The Misgendering Machines: Trans/HCI Implications of Automatic Gender Recognition, by Os Keyes
- Race After Technology, by Ruha Benjamin
- Bonus: Ruha Benjamin’s talk in the Conversations for Change hosted by the National Center for Women in Information Technology
- Watching the Black Body, by Malkia Cyrill
- This was originally published in McSweeney’s “The End of Trust” edition, produced in collaboration with the EFF
- The Whiteness of AI, by Cave and Dihal
Digital Rights
- DRM Broke Its Promise, by Cory Doctorow. Locus Magazine
- IP, by Cory Doctorow. Locus Magazine
- We Are Tenants on Our Own Devices, by Zeynep Tufekci. Wired Magazine
Big Data and AI
- Algorithms of Oppression, by Safiya Umoja Noble (subtitle: how search engines reinforce racism)
- Automating Inequality, by Virginia Eubanks (subtitle: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor)
- A critique of pure learning and what artificial neural networks can learn from animal brains, by Anthony Zador
- Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP, by Strubell et al
- How Robust Are Probabilistic Models of Higher-Level Cognition?, by Gary F. Marcus and Ernest Davis
- Litigating Algorithms 2019 US Report, by Richardson et al. AI Now Institute
- The Short Anthropological Guide to the Study of Ethical AI, by Alexandrine Royer
- To predict and serve?, by Lum and Issac
- See their presentation at FAT/ML 2016
- Weapons of Math Destruction, by Cathy O’Neil (subtitle: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy)
- Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data, by Emily M. Bender and Alexander Koller
AI & AI Ethics
- The AI Liability Puzzle and a Fund-Based Work-Around, by Erdélyi and Erdélyi
- Disability, Bias, and AI, by Whittaker et al. AI Now Institute
- Automating Autism: Disability, Discourse, and Artificial Intelligence, by OS Keyes
NLP
- GPT-3, Bloviator, by Marcus and Davis (subtitle: OpenAI’s language generator has no idea what it’s talking about)
- Miller’s Monkey Updated: Communicative Efficiency and the Statistics of Words in Natural Language, by Caplan et al
- Semantically Equivalent Adversarial Rules for Debugging NLP models, by Ribeiro et al
- The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World by Joshi et al
Tech Addiction
- Addicted to Your iPhone? You’re Not Alone, by Bianca Bosker. The Atlantic
- Dark Patterns are designed to trick you (and they’re all over the Web), by Harry Brignull
- A Different Kind of Streaking, by Note to Self
- FarmVille Once Took Over Facebook. Now Everything Is FarmVille, by Daniel Victor. The New York Times
- Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?, by Jean M. Twenge. The Atlantic
- When Websites Won’t Take No for an Answer, by Natasha Singer. The New York Times
Tracking and Technology
- Are you ready? Here is all the data Facebook and Google have on you, by Dylan Curran. The Guardian
- Europe’s top court says active consent is needed for tracking cookies, by Natasha Lomas. Tech Crunch
- Hey Siri! Stop recording and sharing my private conversations, by Roisin Kiberd. The Guardian
- How Facebook Tracks You, Even When You’re Not on Facebook, by Allen St. John. Consumer Reports
- There Is No (Real Life) Use Case for Face Super Resolution, by Fabian Offert
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff (subtitle: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power)
Online Advertising
- A Dangerous Question: Does Internet Advertising Work at All?, by Derek Thompson. The Atlantic
- Can advertising support a free internet?, by David Benady. The Guardian
- Let’s Check The Tape, by Note to Self
- The Internet’s Original Sin, by Ethan Zuckerman. The Atlantic
Data Science (Not discussed but good reading material!)
- Many Analysts, One Data Set: Making Transparent How Variations in Analytic Choices Affect Results, by Silberzahn et al.
- “On Rational, Scientific, Objective Viewpoints from Mythical, Imaginary, Impossible Standpoints” In Data Feminism , by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein
- Science Isn’t Broken, by Christie Aschwanden. FiveThirtyEight
- The Good, the Bad, and the Biased: Five Ways Visualizations Can Mislead (and How to Fix Them), by Danielle Szafir
Miscellaneous
- A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide, by Cyd Harrell
- A student guide for navigating ethical issues in the tech industry, by The Mozilla Foundation
- Ethics of Invention, by Sheila Jasanoff (subtitle: Technology and the Human Future)
- Data Voids, by Golbiewski and Boyd. The Data and Society Institute (subtitle: Where Missing Data Can Easily Be Exploited)
- Do Artifacts Have Politics?, by Langdon Winner
- Friend and Foe: The Platform Press at the Heart of Journalism, by Rashidian et al. Columbia Journalism Review
- Machinelearners, by Adrian Mackenzie
- (Mis)gendering, by Os Keyes
- Obfuscation: A User’s Guide, by Finn Brunton and Helen Nussbaum
- Plain Text, by Dennis Tenen (subtitle: The Poetics of Computation)
- Twitter and Tear Gas, by Zeynep Tufekci (subtitle: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest)
- Your Computer Isn’t Yours by Jeffrey Paul
Bonus
This reading group has been over for a while now, but every now and again I see something that would have made the reading list if the group was still active. This section contains those pieces.
- On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?, by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell
- OpenAI’s Whisper is another case study in Colonization, by Keoni Mahelona, Gianna Leoni, Suzanne Duncan, Miles Thompson. By Papareo