An algorithm, in essence, is a recipe for an outcome so desired by the person who created the recipe (Cathy O’Neil). Thus, every algorithm, no matter its nature, is subjective to the desires and goals of its creator. Algorithmic criticism has everything to do with morality, and the fight especially within research to make algorithms that will actually draw out a more focused answer to the questions posed, rather than what that most common answer is. Safiya Noble proposes the notion in Algorithms of Oppression, that it is now critical to “think about whether it truly makes sense to outsource all of our knowledge needs to commercial search engines…in lieu of libraries, librarians, teachers, researchers, and other knowledge keepers and resources.” (pg 16). This concept resonates strongly with not just drawing out the more specific knowledge we ask for, rather than the competitive answer that the engine’s algorithm drives to the top, but as well as with the ethics with which this knowledge is derived and shared. The idea of algorithmic criticism is external criticism of the results of what is output by an algorithm, is in its essence, a balance of differing opinions. Given the nature of historical research being one driven by the need to discover the truth (or the closest version of the truth to which we may get), and the biases inflicted upon these truths by the sources and the researchers themselves, it is difficult to truly change the consumption of historic media. It is still important to focus on the ethics and morality which we as historians, employ when we go looking for answers.
Noble’s chapter focusing on the re-imposition of sexism and racism in on the worlds most popular commercial search engine, highlights the longstanding strength of these ideologies, and how their being reinforced by popular majorities, against smaller parties who seek to fight it. The Long Civil Rights Movement, as well as the continuing remnants of the suffragette fights brought a strong, but somehow subtle front to the 1930s- the Civil Rights movement as we knew it to be in the 1960s was finally starting to gain speed in the 1930s, especially with opportunities for work and influence beginning to open more and more with the Federal Theater Project, eventually paving the way for such a wide variety of influential music we hear today. Women continued to fight for their rights, continuing the struggle which had initially beginning in the ‘20s, and still carries a lasting impact today, especially with jobs which had opened during the New Deal and set in place the norm of women being employed in similar spaces as men, such as is seen today. The pressures of racism and sexism however, have still not relented nearly as much as we think, and the output of search engine algorithms in present day, as noted especially in the beginning of Noble’s article, only fuel these pressing notions. Removing such significance from these digital algorithms and search engines, perhaps not so much as within popular and commercial culture, but at least in modes of historical research, can be fueled in some ways by moving back to non-digital sources.
Bibliography:
Noble, Safiya. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism . New York, NY: New York University Press, 2018.
O’Neil, Cathy. “The Truth About Algorithms: Cathy O’Neil.” Vimeo, October 17, 2018. https://vimeo.com/295525907.
Ramsay, Stephen. “Algorithmic Criticism.” A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, 2008. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405148641/9781405148641.xml&chunk.id=ss1-6-7.
