Category: Government & Policy
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SSRC Works with Facebook To Make Data Available for Ethically Responsible Research
Dr. Alondra Nelson, President of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and a member of HASTAC’s Council of Advisors, today announced a crucial new initiative to study, with responsible and ethical practices, social media data. Congratulations and gratitude to SSRC for taking this crucially important step. Speaking personally: I’m less excited about researchers studying the…
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Twenty Things Higher Ed Can Learn from the Parkland High School Kids #MarchforOurLives #REV
What Higher Ed Can Learn from High School Activists #MarchforOurLives #REV I’m thinking about yesterday’s #MarchforOurLives protest in DC and all over America, how it was organized by high school students who had endured the most unimaginable violence, and how they turned something horrific into something productive, violence against them into an action…
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Digital Accessibility and You
I have been working on a series of blog posts on digital accessibility for the last several months. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, as I am a disabled student and worker in a digital world. I try to advance projects and accessibility in general, and to lead and…
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Black Listing Then and Now?: Similarities and Continuities
On February 6, 2018 “Black Listed” held its second class. We began the class with what is now becoming a usual fashion: we welcomed each other, grabbed a few snacks and directed ourselves to the assigned text. For this week, students were to have read William J. Maxwell‘s “Total Literary Awareness.” As the class opened, we…
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SAVE NetNeutrality
Centering Around Net Neutrality: A Statement from the Critical Pedagogy Summit Seattle, WA, Dec 1, 2017 Via Ivette Bayo Urban, PhC, MEd., MSIS “Removing net neutrality benefits the individuals and entities that value maximizing financial profit. History has shown such preferential benefits will negatively impact other individuals and groups – those who are often referred to as ‘marginalized’ or ‘minority’. Maintaining net neutrality…
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Cyber bullying and Social Media
One of the biggest things that people of online communities tend to overlook is the fact that words do hurt. Although these things that are hurtful are not being said online, saying them online can amount to just as much hurt and maybe even more. I have been a witness and a victim to cyberbullying…
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The Debate With Online Surveillance
The Debate with Online Surveillance The topic of online surveillance has long been an issue up for debate. According to Merriam-Webster, surveillance can be defined as, “close watch kept over someone or something,” (Merriam-Webster), https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/surveillance. So that begs the questions, is there anything that is really, truly private that you can do on the…
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Lessons from the 2016 US Presidential Election
This was originally published at https://justinepperly.wordpress.com/2016/11/26/post-election-thoughts/ Post Election Thoughts Like you I was truly disgusted with election coverage, results, and resulting coverage of the results, and therefore tried to avoid any discussion of it over the Thanksgiving holiday. This has given me some mental space to really think about what Trump’s victory means: 1. “American Democracy…
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Pausing to Reflect
This has been… a big year. While the Futures Initiative team and I formally reflect on the past year through the exercise of writing and designing our annual report, and while we plan for an unusual year ahead, I’d like to take a moment and offer a more personal reflection as well. In working on our…
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Mapping the Geography of Racism: Why Deep Dives in Data Matter
Drawing from the work of “Mapping Inequality,” a ProPublica investigative report published earlier this month uncovered a phenomenon similar to redlining in the car insurance industry today. The report found insurers charged premiums that were up to 30 percent higher in minority neighborhoods than in predominantly white neighborhoods with similar rates of accident risk. “As rates have…