Digital self-determination/Information Diets
In this module, learners will engage with a major issue: the question how we can build an information ecosystem that allows for an information diet that supports the kind of informed choices digital self-determination hopes to enable. The module starts with a broad overview but then focus on the particular case of Wikipedia and open-access research. How do we both expand the knowledge that is available on the web while ensuring that the available content is not just from the institutions and communities with the most resources?
Learning Materials
[edit | edit source]Read
- Where does information in Wikipedia come from? (blogpost for academic paper)
- Background of scientific publishing:
- Internet Archive Scholar blogpost
- Chapter "Responses & Responsibilities" in Sarah Genner's book ON | OFF - Risks and Rewards of the Anytime-Anywhere Internet
Watch
- Anasuya Sengupta, Founder of Whose Knowledge? Keynote at 2018 MIT Grand Challenges Summit (watch at least from 23:00 to 35:50)
- Short video summary of ON | OFF (5:30 minutes)
Do
- See Part 1 of this week's activity.
Video Sparks
[edit | edit source]These videos are not meant to comprehensively cover the topics. Instead, these videos are meant to spark a conversation about the ideas contained within. They often contain questions or different lenses from which to explore the week's topic. Viewers should look to the videos for ideas and from there, explore possible on their own, relevant research, videos, government documents, reports, etc that can further enhance their understanding.
| Speaker | Sarah Genner | Isaac Johnson | Bryan Newbold | Satdeep Gill |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Video | ||||
| Video Summary | Sarah Genner offers a broad overview of the complex issues one should consider in evaluating how healthy is one’s information diet. Starting from various uses of “information”, this talk explores conceptual attempts to account for digital phenomena such as information economy, “infodemic” and presents Laswell’s Model of communication as a way to assess the information overload we frequently receive. The talk also maps alternative ways to relate with digital technologies such as “calm technology”, “digital detox”, “share mindfully”, “slow media”, and other ways to reclaim our attention and defend ourselves from surveillance. | Isaac Johnson introduces open knowledge initiatives and the tensions that inevitably arise from their fragile balance between quantity and quality of information. | Bryan Newbold talks about the work of Archive.org in keeping an open record of the Internet. Bryan briefly explains the ongoing transformation of the scholarly publication sector and how large academic publishers seem to have found a new way to dominate the field despite the rise of open access publications. These new dynamics in producing, keeping, and distributing academic knowledge compel us to reflect on who is and who should be responsible for keeping “the common” of the scholarly record. | Satdeep Gill recounts the story of Wikipedia in Punjabi, how it started by translating articles from English and how it quickly transformed into a fast-growing body of knowledge that includes digitized texts in Panjabi language that are in the public domain. Satdeep asks what would be the perfect balance for the Punjabi Wikimedia community between translating articles from other languages and going through the troubles of digitizing Punjabi texts. |
Learning Artifacts
[edit | edit source]This week’s activity consisted of a critical assessment of a Wikipedia entry by examining it in its encyclopedic context (e.g. the same entry in different languages and other linked entries), the sources cited, whether it adheres to a neutral point of view, what other voices and references were left out, and more
| Artifact | Author | Description |
|---|---|---|
 |
Anonymous | This piece provides an assessment on the Wikipedia page - Citizenship Amendment Act (2019), and focuses on effective ways of decolonizing knowledge through the exploration of the perspectives, languages, and sources employed in the Wiki. |
 |
Eraldo | This infographic offers an analysis of the ways in which the viewpoints of contemporary activists—namely, Black Lives Matter activists in the U.S., pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, and members of the Civil Disobedience Movement in Myanmar—have been left out from the English-language Wikipedia entry on civil disobedience. |
 |
Zachary Marcone | Analyzing the Wikipedia pages in different languages for China's digital currency, the digital yuan. |
 |
Karolina Alama-Maruta | An exploration of the 2020-2021 Women's Strike protests in Poland entry on Wikipedia. |
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Kawsar Ali | An assessment of the Christchurch Shooting Wikipedia Page. |
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Tomás Guarna | An examination of Misinformation Wikipedia entries and their translations. |
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Carmen Ng | A critique of the Wikipedia entry, "‘regulation of artificial intelligence". |
Activity
[edit | edit source]This is a two-part activity: a small exploration prior to the start of the module and then a deeper investigation and creation of an artifact following the session. The overall goal is to select a topic on Wikipedia with which you have some familiarity and summarize what knowledge sources are included and what steps would be taken to decolonize this topic.
Part I (Do before delving into the videos)
- Choose a Wikipedia article about a topic that you have some familiarity with (so you can evaluate the existing sources and what might be missing) and for which you might expect there to be tension between sources that are cited and lived experiences of people that are relevant to the article. This can be as broad as the article about an entire population of people or as specific as e.g., a protest that happened and has a Wikipedia article.
- Do an initial scan of the article to get a sense of how well it adheres to a Neutral Point of View and what viewpoints are left out, particularly if they are from those most-impacted by the article.
Part II (Do after exploring the videos and other artifacts)
- Do a deeper dive into the content for your topic. Examine the existing content and sources. What languages is the article available in? Was it translated from one language to others? What sources are cited in each article (if the article exists in many languages, just choose a few languages to examine)? From whose perspective are those sources written? If they are accessible online, who are they citing? Is the source written in the same language as the article? Is there any discussion on the talk pages about neutrality? Go as deeply as you can in sketching out the current sources of knowledge and feel free to document this however you'd like -- e.g., anything from a simple list with annotations to drawing out a map etc.
- Identify what content and sources are missing. What experiences are missing from the article's narrative? Who is impacted by the article? What languages should it exist in (or be higher quality) that it doesn't? What steps might have to be taken to decolonize this content -- e.g., are the sources available but just need to be included? Are they unavailable in digital form or primary sources (and therefore difficult to cite)?
- Bonus: feel free to add any content that you think should be in the article that currently is not.
Logistics
- This could be quite expansive depending on the topic you choose so feel free to limit yourself to two hours.
- If you would like to pair up with someone who you feel may have complementary knowledge on the topic, that is completely acceptable.
- You may create your artifact however you'd like -- e.g., essay format, a sketch, a screen recording with voiceover or annotations, recording of a discussion/interview, etc.
If you are exploring this course on your own, we encourage you to create artifacts to share on Twitter or other social media platforms using the following hashtag: #DigitalSelfDetermination
Speaker Bios
[edit | edit source]Sarah Genner is a media and internet scholar and lecturer at various universities in Switzerland and and a visiting scholar at the Collegium Helveticum, co-sponsored by ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, and the Zurich University of the Arts. Her research focuses on societal and psychological effects of the digital transformation. She is the author of numerous publications. She studied in Zurich and Berlin. After working as a teacher, journalist, and consultant, she was an associate researcher and lecturer at Zurich University of Applied Sciences from 2010 to 2018 focusing on digital media and the future of work. From 2014 to 2015, she was a visiting scholar and SNSF fellow at Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Her dissertation “ON/OFF – Risks and Rewards of the Anytime-Anywhere Internet” won the Mercator Award by the University of Zurich.
Bryan Newbold is a software developer and leads the Internet Archive's efforts to preserve and provide universal access to open research content. He has a background building scientific instruments, operating undersea robots, and contributing to peer-to-peer "dweb" network protocols. 2020-2021 Coronavirus quarantine has been spent in a group house in Seattle, WA, watching bamboo grow and cooking a different meal every night for a year.
Satdeep Gill is a Program Officer under the Community Programs team within the Wikimedia Foundation. In his role, Satdeep connects cultural institutions, including museums, archives, and libraries, with Wikimedia projects to further expand access to free knowledge globally. His work specifically focuses on leveraging Wikisource (Wikimedia’s free digital ebook library) to grow content in underrepresented languages online and connect cultural institutions to the Wikisource infrastructure to share their collections online. Satdeep is a longtime volunteer editor, contributing primarily to Punjabi Wikipedia and Punjabi Wikisource. He began working at the Wikimedia Foundation in 2017. Isaac Johnson is a research scientist with the Wikimedia Foundation. He has been conducting research on geographic inequities in digital knowledge since 2014 with a specific focus on Wikipedia and its sister projects since 2018. Through his work, he seeks to understand the barriers that marginalized communities face in securing representation online, build tools that demonstrate these challenges, and design interventions to ensure that they are not replicated via algorithmic systems.