Keynote for IR4U2 @ ECIR 2024
These are the resources for my keynote talk, “To Serve Whom and How? Provocations on the Political and Ethical Foundations of Access to Information Access”, at the IR4U2 workshop at ECIR 2024.
- 🌅 Abstract
- 🎥 Recording (also on YouTube)
- 🧑🏻🏫 Slides
- 📝 Edited transcript
Abstract
Enabling broader access to information access technologies and their resulting benefits for acquiring, updating, and disseminating knowledge is a vital project for both research and industrial development. In this talk, I take up the complex and multifaceted question of why we might pursue this goal: What is the ultimate purpose of enabling such access? What ethical principles may motivate that goal or specific efforts in its pursuit? What theory of change or political vision is assumed by such efforts? What technological, informational, political, and economic systems are users brought into as their information access is enhanced? What are these users’ roles relative to other actors in the sociotechnical milieu in which information retrieval operates?
I argue that these questions have significant implications for when and how we work to enable more universal information access, and how we define and evaluate success in that quest. My goal with this talk is to promote discussion of the questions, goals, and assumptions underlying the kinds of work presented at IR4U2 and elsewhere, and the consequences these underlying and sometimes unstated factors have for research, development, and society.
Recording
Also available on YouTube or as an edited transcript.
Slides
Resources and Works Cited
- ECIR24-i2024
2024. Not Just Algorithms: Strategically Addressing Consumer Impacts in Information Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR ’24, IR for Good track). Lecture Notes in Computer Science 14611:314–335DOI 10.1007/978-3-031-56066-8_25. NSF PAR 10497110. Acceptance rate: 35.9%. Cited 4 times. Cited 3 times.
, , , and . - ACM Code of Ethics.
- IFLA Code of Ethics for Librarians and other Information Workers.
- Viewpoint Discrimination with Algorithms.
- Ars Technica on political discrimination
- Lawrence, E E. 2020. “On the Problem of Oppressive Tastes in the Public Library.” Journal of Documentation 76 (5): 1091–1107. doi:10.1108/JD-01-2020-0002.
- Belkin, N J, and S E Robertson. 1976. “Some Ethical and Political Implications of Theoretical Research in Information Science.” In Proceedings of the ASIS Annual Meeting. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255563562.
- World Day of Peace message from Pope Francis.
- Māori Data Sovereignty Principles from Te Mana Raraunga.
- Franklin, Ursula M. 2004. The Real World of Technology. Revised Edition. CBC Massey Lectures. Toronto, Ont.; Berkeley, CA: House of Anansi Press. http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1989-cbc-massey-lectures-the-real-world-of-technology-1.2946845.
Q&A Papers
In the Q&A, we also discussed these works:
- RecSys162016
2016. Behaviorism is Not Enough: Better Recommendations through Listening to Users. In Proceedings of the Tenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys ’16, Past, Present, and Future track). ACM. DOI 10.1145/2959100.2959179. Acceptance rate: 36%. Cited 136 times. Cited 91 times.
and . - Epps-Darling, Avriel, Romain Takeo Bouyer, and Henriette Cramer. 2020. “Artist Gender Representation in Music Streaming.” In Proceedings of the 21st International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, 248–54. ISMIR. https://program.ismir2020.net/poster_2-11.html.
- Starke, Alain, Martijn C Willemsen, and Chris Snijders. 2015. “Saving Energy in 1-D: Tailoring Energy-Saving Advice Using a Rasch-Based Energy Recommender System.” In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Decision Making and Recommender Systems (DMRS 2015), 5–8. Bolzano, Italy. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1533/paper2.pdf.