Hi All, 

There are just a few weeks left in the semester, so it is time to get going on the final assignment, the literature review.

That means that this week, the literature review rough draft is due. Details on what is expected are available here. Please note that you will email this assignment directly to me, do not post it in the forum.

DB Roundup

Last week explored the topics of public libraries and systems of classification. In keeping with just about everything we’ve touched on this semester, the underlying themes of bias and access are still at play here. Access to information has been controlled in a variety of ways throughout this country’s history, and public libraries are no exception to this. The impact of segregated education and libraries is will with us today.

As with the algorithms that undergird our search engines, classification systems were created by people (who had biases, as do we all) and those people’s biases got encoded in the systems, to the point where they’re so normalized, it is hard to read them as biases. As a species, we love the idea of ordering knowledge, but it is a near impossible task, as it presumes a universal truth and a singular way of understanding the world.