Safiya Umoja Noble

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · Department of Information Studies

Scholars from a range of disciplines interrogate terms relevant to critical studies of big data, from abuse and aggregate to visualization and vulnerability. This groundbreaking work offers an interdisciplinary perspective on big data and the archives they accrue, interrogating key terms. Scholars from a range of disciplines analyze concepts releva...

Protestors across the world use aesthetics in order to communicate their ideas and ensure their voices are heard. This book looks at protest aesthetics, which we consider to be the visual and performative elements of protest, such as images, symbols, graffiti, art, as well as the choreography of protest actions in public spaces. Through the use of...

Notions of free speech and expectations of speaker anonymity are instrumental aspects of online information practice in the United States, which manifest in greater protections for speakers of hate, while making targets of trolling and hate speech more vulnerable. In this chapter, we argue that corporate digital media platforms moderate and manage...

The circulation of surveillance videos and images of African Americans murdered or detained by police and private security has been enhanced by the spectacle of new media. Media spectacles are created by surveillance records to foster news ratings and advertising revenues at the expense of national conversations and public policy addressing racial...

As seen in Wired and Time A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms Run a Google search for “black girls”—what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radical...

This chapter discusses the implications of wearable technologies like Google Glass that function as a tool for occupying, commodifying, and profiting from the biological, psychological, and emotional data of its wearers and those who fall within its gaze. We argue that Google Glass privileges an imaginary of unbridled exploration and intrusion into...

Social Responsibility and Diversity are two principal tenets of the field of library and information science (LIS) as defined by the American Library Association’s “Core Values of Librarianship” but that often remain on the margins of LIS education, leading to limited student engagement with these concepts and limited faculty modeling of socially r...

This book opens up new lines of inquiry using various intersectional frameworks. Whether we use Black Feminism as a lens that allows us to ask questions, and conduct new investigations, or some other lenses like political economy, cultural studies and critical theory, what we need are theoretical and methodological approaches that allow us to inter...

Training culturally competent and socially responsible library and information science (LIS) professionals requires a blended approach that extends across curricula, professional practice, and research. Social justice can support these goals by serving as a topic of inquiry in LIS curricula as well as by providing a scholarly framework for understa...

This paper is a political economic critique and exploration of the ways that private-sector companies in the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) industry have emerged and consolidated themselves. This includes a discussion about buying, analyzing and selling spatial data mined from the Internet and other public resources, and how this is packaged...

Access to information and communications technology (ICT) is considered important for individuals to fully achieve educational and economic development goals. In fact, ICT access has become so important that the lack of it has been termed the digital divide. To combat the digital divide, community-based computing centers were created as a vital fir...