CDH to host Safiya Noble, Author of Algorithms of Oppression for Year of Data Keynote Lecture

“ Algorithms of Oppression is a wakeup call to bring awareness to the biases of the internet, and should motivate all concerned people to ask why those biases exist, and who they benefit."

- The New York Review of Books

The CDH is excited to host Safiya Noble, best-selling author of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press: 2018). On Thursday, December 6, Noble will present the keynote lecture for the CDH’s Year of Data - a campus-wide initiative aimed to encourage critical thinking about how data shapes our research, teaching, and daily lives.

Noble’s lecture continues the important conversation about data ethics started at the CDH’s Intersectional Data symposium and in our Collections as Data Reading Group. Demonstrating that data discrimination is a true social problem, Noble highlights real-world examples of bias within search engines such as Google. She makes a compelling argument that private interests, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of search engines, leads to biased search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.

Join us for Safiya Noble’s talk at 4:30pm in East Pyne 010, or follow as we live-tweet from @PrincetonDH #CDHYODA.

Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School of Communication. Her academic research focuses on the design of digital media platforms on the internet and their impact on society. Noble holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a B.A. in Sociology from California State University, Fresno with an emphasis on African American/Ethnic Studies.

Learn more about Safiya Noble’s research at: https://safiyaunoble.com/research-writing/

This event is made possible through generous support of many departments and centers on campus. We thank: Princeton University Library, Humanities Council, Center for Collaborative History, Department of African American Studies, University Center for Human Values, Center for Information and Technology Policy, Department of Computer Science, Center for Statistics and Machine Learning, Department of Sociology, Department of Politics, Department of Anthropology, Department of Mathematics, Woodrow Wilson School, and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM).