Monthly Archives: February 2013

Intersection of Gender and Knowledge

A recent episode of the Freakonomics podcast, “Women Are Not Men,” looked at gender inequities in various arenas. I thought the discussion of why women are less likely to be editors and contributors to Wikipedia raises some interesting issues about how the construction of knowledge is complicated by culturally-bound notions of whether competitiveness is essentially a male or a female trait. After pointing to a study documenting the dramatically lower participation levels of women in Wikipedia editing, the hosts of the podcast moved on to look at studies of how competitiveness is gendered in a patriarchal society and a matriarchal one.

I can’t wait to figure out how I’ll use this in LIB 3040 this semester.

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Investigating Truth with Web Tools

In a post on the Information Literacy @ CUNY blog, Maura Smale spotlights a video of a TED talk by journalist Markham Nolan that might be useful in our credit courses: How to Separate Fact and Fiction Online.

Nolan’s presentation touches on:

  • the changing nature of journalism
  • new techniques for factchecking
  • authority of sources
  • what does truth mean
  • visual literacy
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Encoding Race into Search Algorithms

Over on the blog I set up for students in my section of LIB 3040, I wrote a post about a recent study that suggests that racial stereotypes are encoded into the algorithm used to determine what ads to display alongside your search results in Google.

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