Seminar Paper: Exclusion by design: how existing knowledge infrastructures keep women off the Web
Dr Padmini Ray Murray, Design Beku, Bengaluru.
17th Jan 2019 (17:30-19:30)
Digital Scholarship Centre, Centre for Research Collections, Main University Library, 30 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LJ (Central Area)
In this paper, I will be examining how the design of knowledge infrastructure on our devices and of the Web are built to discriminate and perpetuate non-feminist approaches, and how it is essential that feminist activism challenges this by suggesting alternative ways to structure our interactions with knowledge and information in the digital space. My discussion will explore the relationship between the web as archive and the algorithm, demonstrating how corporate technology hegemonies are threatening the open web, using strategies such as funneling search by algorithm, and discouraging the use of the web browser by making their offerings app first, and website later. For women with access to limited resources such as education and literacy, these “dark patterns” posit a particular threat, allowing them no recourse to other forms of information outside the “walled garden” created by algorithms. In order to further tighten their grasp on new users, especially women, these dark patterns are reinscribed by education programmes run by Google and Facebook, ostensibly to help ease their transition to the digital, but in reality, indoctrinate them away from the values at the heart of the open web.
My paper will be informed by two case studies: firstly, an examination of how the Google Cultural Institute’s agenda to assimilate data from memory institutions, archives, publishers has dangerous consequences for how feminist history is represented online, due to both the flattening nature of metadata produced by machines rather than humans; and secondly, an exploration of use cases (drawn from my research as Co-Investigator on the Gendering the Smart City project) of young women from economically underprivileged backgrounds that reveals how their primary device for connectivity, the mobile phone, prevents them from exploring the Web to its fullest potential. By raising these questions, I hope to demonstrate how as activists we need to be thinking more deeply about the infrastructures that dominate knowledge and our experience of the Web itself, and will be offering some possible ways forward in terms of design and algorithmic interventions (such as how more careful metadata tagging, or creating more content on sites like Wikipedia) can help push back against the epistemological violence being waged against women by technology corporations.
Speaker biography
Dr Padmini Ray Murray is a researcher and creator who is passionate about transforming ways in which we make and share knowledge.
While her academic work has been published in several leading journals, she also creates new media work which reflects her research and interests:
her British Council/AHRC funded Kinect game prototype, Meghdoot was exhibited at the Unbox Festival in 2012; her meditation on how we read in the age of the digital, Pressed For Time(with Claire Stewart and Peggy Hughes) was funded by New Media Scotland and exhibited at The Electric Bookshop in 2014.
In 2016, she made Darshan Diversion (with KV Ketan and Joel Johnson), a videogame about the Sabarimala issue and in 2017 (with Pratyush Raman) built Halt The Hate, an interactive database of crimes against minorities in India for Amnesty International.
She is currently based in Bengaluru where she has founded a not for profit organisation called Design Beku, which provides design collateral for NGOs and grassroots organisations.
• Eligibility
• All staff
• All students
• All externals
• Contact: Email: digitalscholarship@ed.ac.uk
Date and Time
17th Jan 2019 (17:30-19:30)
Digital Scholarship Centre, Centre for Research Collections, Main University Library, 30 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LJ (Central Area)