Automation, Algorithms, and Bias, from Settler Colonialism through the Future of Auditing: Computational Histories, Critical Infrastructure Studies
Suggested readings from Sarah Montoya
Articles
- Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and PracticeThis essay traces a counterstory to Western claims to the origins of hypertext and multimedia by remembering how American Indian communities have employed wampum belts as hypertextual technologies—as wampum belts have extended human memories of inherited knowledges through interconnected, nonlinear designs and associative storage and retrieval methods—long before the "discovery" of Western hypertext. By forging intellectual trade routes between Tehanetorens, Wallace, Williams, and other wampum historians with the work of Western hypertext theorists,... this essay positions American Indians as the first known skilled multimedia workers and intellectuals in the Americas. Thus wampum has the potential to re-vision the intellectual history of technology, hypertext, and multimedia studies, and thereby American Indian studies—and such a re-visioning calls for a responsibility to digital and visual rhetorical sovereignty.
- Theorizing Indigital Geographic Information NetworksIn this article, I argue that in North America, 500 years of cartographic encounters and translations have transformed Indigenous map-making and geospatial technology processes into an amalgam of knowledge systems, science, and technology. To do this I first review the processes of map-making that have been shaped by continual cartographic encounters, exchanges, and translations between American Indians and Euro-Americans. Dichotomies between Indigenous-traditional and Western-scientific are prevalent within the literature, but the boundaries between geographic knowledge systems have always been fuzzy and crossable. This review includes some processes strongly shaped by Indigenous communities, such as ethnocartography and counter-mapping in Alaska and Canada, and GIS processes controlled more by government institutions in the lower 48 US states. Second, I introduce the tenets of a new model - indigital Geographic Information Networks (iGIN) - to describe the heterogeneous processes of encounters, exchanges, and translations merging Indigenous, scientific, and digital technologies into inclusive forms of technoscience. Third, I demonstrate iGIN processes through exploratory research at the university level, using Kiowa-language narratives and network GIS to create a new 'third' construct. Finally, following brief concluding remarks, I propose future research directions.
Websites
- To Queer Code: Ann Daramola on Learning and Teaching Computer Programming Part IAnn Daramola is a web developer, technologist, mediamaker, educator, and computer programmer from Los Angeles, California. She’s responsible for creating and developing Afrolicious, an online network for people to create and champion their own stories. I chat with Daramola about her experiences learning and studying computer programming as an immigrant to the U.S. Daramola also shares her insights about what it means to understand, teach, and “queer” code by asking “What would a computer look like if it was coded by Haitian women?”.
Books
Inventing the Internet
Janet Abbate recounts the key players and technologies that allowed the Internet to develop; but her main focus is always on the social and cultural factors that influenced the Internet's design and use.
Network sovereignty: building the Internet across Indian Country
The histories of information and communication technologies (ICTs) are intertwined with U.S. histories of colonization, and the sovereignty and self-determination of Native peoples. This book examines case studies of tribal governments building out broadband infrastructures to reveal how the processes of network design and deployment embed these information and communication infrastructures within the ongoing exercise of tribal sovereignty in the U.S.
New Media
The rapid growth of new media technologies is radically changing film production and consumption. 'New Media' responds to these revolutionary developments to address topics such as computer games, digital animation techniques, media convergence, and internet audiences.
See specifically: Gillespie, Tarleton. “The Stories Digital Tools Tell.”
Debates in the Digital Humanities
Debates in the Digital Humanities brings together leading figures in the field to explore its theories, methods, and practices and to clarify its multiple possibilities and tensions. From defining what a digital humanist is and determining whether the field has (or needs) theoretical grounding, to discussions of coding as scholarship and trends in data-driven research, this cutting-edge volume delineates the current state of the digital humanities and envisions potential futures and challenges.
See specifically: McPherson, Tara. "Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation."
Algorithms of Oppression
A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms.
Down to Earth
Down to Earth presents the first comprehensive overview of the geopolitical maneuvers, financial investments, technological innovations, and ideological struggles that take place behind the scenes of the satellite industry.
Digital Capitalism
The networks that comprise cyberspace were originally created at the behest of government agencies, military contractors and allied educational institutions. However, recently a growing number of these networks began to serve primarily corporate users. Under the sway of an expansionary market logic, the Internet began a political-economic transition toward what Dan Schiller calls digital capitalism.
Wired into Nature
The completion of the Transcontinental Telegraph in 1861 completed telegraphy's mile-by-mile trek across the West. In addition to linking the coasts, the telegraph represented an extraordinary American effort in many fields of endeavor to know, act upon, and control a continent. Merging new research with bold reinterpretation, James Schwoch details the unexplored dimensions of the frontier telegraph and its impact.
Who Controls the Internet?
Is the Internet erasing national borders? Will the future of the Net be set by Internet engineers, rogue programmers, the United Nations, or powerful countries? Who's really in control of what's happening on the Net? In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet's challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world.
Cryopolitics
In Cryopolitics, experts from anthropology, history of science, environmental humanities, and indigenous studies make clear the political and cultural consequences of extending life and deferring death by technoscientific means.
See specifically: TallBear, Kim. "Beyond the Life/Not Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of
Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking and the New Materialisms."
Signal Traffic
The contributors to Signal Traffic investigate how the material artifacts of media infrastructure--transoceanic cables, mobile telephone towers, Internet data centers, and the like--intersect with everyday life.