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NISO Awards 2023 - Miles Conrad Lecture by Dr. Safiya Noble
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NISO Awards 2023 - Miles Conrad Lecture by Dr. Safiya Noble
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Segment:0 .
TODD CARPENTER: This is the 2023 NISO awards portion of the NISO Plus conference.
TODD CARPENTER: I hope you all have been enjoying the meeting so far. This was in 2020. Some photos of the luncheon that we had. Maybe at some point in the future we will reunite for a luncheon for our awards ceremony. This is one of the things that I truly enjoy, one of the highlights of my year to recognize various people in the community who are participating in our work who really.
TODD CARPENTER: Really make what nice. So is the community that we are the difference that we make is all. Part of. A vision of the participants and the leaders that engage in our work.
TODD CARPENTER: I'd like to take a few minutes before we get going, just again to thank our sponsors. There are a large part of how we are able to make this an affordable meeting, a globally inclusive meeting. So when I run through and thank them again, our gigabyte sponsor, our larger sponsor is Cadmore Media. Thank you so much to them. Our megabytes sponsors Figshare, Digital Science.
TODD CARPENTER: Our kilobyte sponsors Access Innovation, ASTM, ASME, Bowker Clarivate, Ex Libris, Crossref, EBSCO, and Silverchair. Our byte sponsors the American Chemical Society, Atypon, Chorus, Duke University press, Edaptive Technologies, Project Muse, Scholastica, SPIE, the Stony Brook Stony Brook University libraries. And also our bit level sponsors Aries,
TODD CARPENTER: The University of California, Berkeley Library Copyright Clearance Center, Dryad, Elsevier, iOS press, Highwire Press (part of MPS), Kriyadocs, the Modern Language Association, OpenAthens, Springer Nature and the University of Delaware library museums and press. I want to thank all of these sponsors so much for contributing to helping us turn this and make this meeting a success.
TODD CARPENTER: As I said, we're an organization of volunteers. We, the nicest staff, are fairly small and concentrated and ambitious, but we by no means could do all of the things that we do as an organization if it were not for the many hundreds of volunteers who contribute both on our working groups, but also on the leadership level, reviewing our standards, but also helping to put this meeting together Jason mentioned these two groups at the outset of the conference.
TODD CARPENTER: Want to thank them again for providing guidance and really on the ground support. In each of the elements, in each of the program, elements of our conference, our advisory committee. Thank you so much to the advisory committee who provide support not only for the conference. But overall our NISO Plus programming. And then specifically for this conference, the planning committee, who helped put together the sessions, organize the sessions, moderate many of the sessions, and contribute to the great program that we've been able to put together this week.
TODD CARPENTER: It is incredibly important that we note and acknowledge the nice of board of directors and. Their many contributions to us running as an organization. Want to see. I think Maria Stanton should.
TODD CARPENTER: Be on the list. I want to make sure that I want to bring her up onto the stage as she had a little something to say. Just a second. I need to. Make allow. There you. There is that. Maria, you should be able to join us here.
MARIA STANTON: Yes thank you, Todd. To everyone. Yes, I'm Maria Stanton, the chair of the NISO board. And I realize this is day two, but on behalf of the board, I want to welcome everyone to nice Plus and thank you for your active participation in our sessions. It's been wonderful to engage with the participants during the Zoom conversations, and I would also like to echo Todd's comments and thank the entire program planning committee, all of the conference volunteers and the speakers for their generous contribution of time and talents to make this a successful time together.
MARIA STANTON: And finally, I want to express the board's gratitude to the entire NISO staff, to Todd, to Nettie, Kendra, Jason, Kimberly, Lisa, Sarah and Mary Beth for their tireless commitments on behalf of our community and on behalf of NISO's mission and vision of a world where we all benefit from the unfettered exchange of information. So thank you, Todd, and I'll turn it back to you now. Thanks, Maria.
TODD CARPENTER: And this photo is actually missing a few people from the NISO staff Jason Griffey and Mary Beth Barilla weren't able to join us. This was our holiday celebration a couple of weeks ago. Towards the end of twenty-two. And you know, in this environment, it's always such a pleasure and a joy to get together and come together since most of our staff is virtual and isn't based here in Baltimore.
TODD CARPENTER: So I'm going to pass it now to Kimberly Graham, who is director of educational programs and our desire advocate to prevent to present the Scholarship award winners for this year. Kimberly, to you. Thank you, Todd. I'm so tickled to have this opportunity, this privilege, to introduce our 2023 Scholarship award winners just as a bit of background.
KIMBERLY GRAHAM: The Scholarship program was established in an effort to support nice's strategic goal to improve diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in our community. Indeed, the first cohort was awarded and introduced at the inaugural nice Plus 2020 conference, which as many of you might remember, was in person. And as Todd said, hopefully we will get to do so again. Since then, we've been virtual and so we haven't been able to meet in person with our Scholarship awardees.
KIMBERLY GRAHAM: But nonetheless, we have continued this tradition and it has been one of the most rewarding aspects of our program and conference with each year and each new cohort. Cohort nice to have been rewarded really with the voices, perspectives and efforts of Scholarship awardees who have joined committees. Working groups and served as speakers on many programs.
KIMBERLY GRAHAM: I think it's safe to say that it has been a rewarding relationship for all. Todd, can you advance the slide for me, please? This program as it enters its fourth year. We're pleased to have an impressive new cohort to introduce to you, and we are grateful to Digital Science for being our generous sponsor for this program. And we also tord, if you could do one more, I want to thank our Scholarship review committee for their time and their deliberation.
KIMBERLY GRAHAM: And considering all of the applicants, we had a really great response. We look forward to each year growing with applications as this program becomes more and more established and the conference becomes more and more established, and that review process takes time. So thank you to our review committee as well. We after reviewing everything. Boiled it down to 15 worthy applicants.
KIMBERLY GRAHAM: And so without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to them. The first is Doyin Adenuga. He's the electronic resources librarian at Houghton University. Joanna Bailey, the course Reserve's manager at Western Washington University. Whitney Bates Gomez, electronic and continuing resources librarian for Georgia State University. Janaynne do Amaral, postdoctoral research associate with the School of Information sciences at University of Illinois, Urbana, Chicago.
KIMBERLY GRAHAM: Champaign. Tarenta Daniels, who is an mlis graduate student at San Jose State University and an assistant operations officer with the US Navy. Amir Rabiya el-Chidiac is a diversity resident research and instruction librarian with Susquehanna University. Stanislava Gardasevic is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant instructor at the library Information School with the University of Hawaii at Mona Minoa.
KIMBERLY GRAHAM: Sorry, Rosy Salman Khan, library assistant with the Indira Gandhi Institute of development research. Grace Kim, electronic resources librarian, Nevada State College. Nancy Kwangwa, scholarly communication and publishing manager with the University of Zimbabwe. And Mubanga Lumpah, senior library assistant at the University of Zambia library.
KIMBERLY GRAHAM: Shima Moradi instruction and research librarian with the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences. Catarina Reed is an instructional support associate with Stony Brook University. And Milo Santamaria is an LIS graduate student at San Jose University and a webmaster with youth facts.
KIMBERLY GRAHAM: Sonali Sugrim is the electronic resources librarian with Queens College at Cuny. Thank you all so very much. We are so excited to have you as our Scholarship awardees and part of our nice community. And thank you again to Digital Science for supporting this program.
TODD CARPENTER: I have been so pleased and impressed and honored to include the Scholarship winners in much of NISO's activities. They have been amazing cohorts over the years. And with this program, we're trying not only to. Highlight and elevate some astounding people in our community, but also try and build diversity and inclusivity into our work and really benefit from their knowledge and expertise.
TODD CARPENTER: And this program has been such a success and I've been so happy with its output, with the outcomes that have been associated with it. So congratulations to all of the awardees. The next award that we provide is the ann-marie Cunningham service award, and it was established in 1994 to honor and face members who routinely went above and beyond the normal call of duty to serve the organization.
TODD CARPENTER: It is named after Anne Marie Cunningham, who, while working with the A&E service, biological abstracts and the Institute for scientific and information. Both now part of the nisa member clarivate analytics. She was a tireless and dedicated and face volunteer. She ultimately served as and faces executive director from 1991 to 1994, when she unfortunately died unexpectedly.
TODD CARPENTER: We are nice so as pleased to continue to present this award and to honor nice volunteers who've shown the same sort of commitment to serving our organization and our community this year. I am so pleased to award the 2023 Ann Marie Cunningham Service Award to Robert Wheeler at ASME. Robert has more than 20 years of experience in STM publishing, ranging from front end production works through online publishing and almost everything in between.
TODD CARPENTER: Currently in his role as director of publishing technologies at asmi, he focuses on all aspects of codes and standards. Publishing previously worked at AIP as product manager and operations manager, the online publishing platform citation and the production operations support manager for their in-house typesetting division. Prior to that, at Springer Kluwer academic, as part of a small team, he was devoted to the planning operation and implementation of electronic initiatives across the enterprise, spearheading a number of projects focused around XML content digital workflows.
TODD CARPENTER: Robert has made a tremendous has been a tremendous force within NISO in recent years. He is always ready to jump in, take on new projects, and he is always a vocal champion of NISO and nice work. He has been convener and co-chair of two nice working groups. He is one of the co organizers of the standards technology forum.
TODD CARPENTER: He's a member of the NISO content collection management topic committee acting as liaison not only for the board and the architecture committee within NISO, but also as liaison between the two working groups that he is co-chair of. He also serves as a member of the board of directors. I am so pleased to recognize Robert's contributions and it is my pleasure to present this award to Robert.
ROBERT WHEELER: Robert, you. Now have the stage is congratulations. Thank you. I'm honored and humbled. And I'm very grateful for this and the experience and relationships gained through NISO work. And of course, there's the impact of what nisoor does. So thank you. Thank you, Robert.
TODD CARPENTER: NISO also has a very long tradition of providing and recognizing distinguished leaders in our community and their contributions over their careers. We do this through the NISO Fellows award. And in 2023, I am honored to recognize Jill O'Neil as the 2023.
TODD CARPENTER: NISO fellow. Those of you involved in NISO will know that she has served NISO for the last seven years as director of content. She has led educational programs over those seven years. And in that time, NISO has put on more than 246 separate events. That works out to about one every other week.
TODD CARPENTER: We also hosted 14 in-person forums as well as a number of annual conferences in that time, as well as director of content. A title she assumed in 2018. NISO published 56 issues of NISO's monthly newsletter, and she managed to get them out on time, usually without many complaints. Apart from my own delays in getting that introduction to her on a monthly basis.
TODD CARPENTER: Prior to joining NISO, she had a long and distinguished career at NFAIS, where she helped organize 15 annual conferences as the director of planning and communications, as well as dozens of other online programs at end phase. Previously she had a. Roles as a writer of corporate communications at Thomson scientific and in the Institute for scientific information. She was also a supervisor in the marketing information department at Elsevier.
TODD CARPENTER: In addition to all of the writing that she's done within interphase and nice, she's published more than a dozen peer reviewed articles, several dozen posts as a chef in the Scholarly Kitchen hosted by the Society for Scholarly Publishing. On a regular basis. Over the years, she has directly or indirectly touched the lives and careers of literally thousands of people, providing them important understanding and information about our community.
TODD CARPENTER: NISO and NFAIS were made so much better organizations because of her involvement, and she has influenced the state of the art through many ways in her many contributions. It is such an honor to recognize Jill and her many contributions over the years with the 2023 nice Fellows award. Before we move on.
TODD CARPENTER: Just want to highlight again that we are set settled on dates for 2024 for those of you on the lookout can put this on to your calendar and ISO will be hosting nice Plus in some fashion between February 12th and 15th, 2024. We will be providing community more information about the form, location and specific dates. Later this spring.
TODD CARPENTER: Finally, one of the highlights of the nice hope conference is the presentation of the Miles Conrad lecture. For those of you not familiar with the background of this award, it has been presented by the National Federation of abstracting and indexing services since the 1960s and since the. Merger of NISO and NFAIS in 2019. NISO has been continuing this trend tradition as a core element of the terms of our NISO Plus conference.
TODD CARPENTER: The Miles Conrad award. Was named after. In the G Miles Conrad, who was director of biological abstracts now bioscience previews, which is currently distributed by clarivate analytics. In 1957, Conrad organized a meeting of 14 A&E services to discuss the implications of new government investments in science communications following the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union that led to the formation of North face the following year.
TODD CARPENTER: In 1958. In 1964. Miles Conrad passed away suddenly at the age of 53, in subsequently the infamous board of directors established an annual lecture series named in his honor that would be a central feature of the annual conference. This award has been presented to a number of industry leaders over the years Tim Collins at PepsiCo information services.
TODD CARPENTER: Dame Lynne Brindley, the CEO of British Library. Frederick Kilgore, the founding director of oclc. Robert Massey, the president of chemical abstract services. Bella hassani, co-founder of silver Platter information. Rob Snyder, the founder and chairman of Cambridge information group. In the last several years, it's been awarded to Jim Neal, University librarian at Columbia university, Heather Joseph, the executive director of spark, and Patricia Brennan, the director of the National Library of Medicine.
TODD CARPENTER: I'm so pleased to award the 2023 Miles Conrad award to Dr. Safiya Noble for her lifetime of achievements to the information community. Through her writing, speaking and advocacy, Dr. Noble has drawn attention to the extensive biases and embedded racism that exist in many technologies that we use not only in scholarly research, but increasingly in the wider community as well.
TODD CARPENTER: This awareness has led to the beginnings of change in some areas of technology. There is much work to do moving forward, but Dr. Noble is driven change and hopefully advancing the banner of inclusivity in technological applications, particularly as it relates to search and discovery. It is for this reason that the NISO board of directors is awarding Dr. Noble the Miles Conrad lecture award this year.
TODD CARPENTER: So excited to welcome her to the stage. I'd now like to pass the microphone to. Suze Kundu, who is at digital science, who will introduce Dr. Noble.
Segment:1 Dr. Noble Introduction.
TODD CARPENTER: Thank you so much, Todd. It is a huge honor for us to be supporting this and for such an eminent researcher to be awarded this amazing award.
SUZE KUNDU: Now, Dr. Nobel has just let me know that she has been watching and tending to her little son, who is not very well. So we are even more honored that she is able to join us today. But that is not the only important role that she plays. Dr. Sophia umoja noble is an internet studies scholar whose work in both sociological and interdisciplinary ways focuses on the way that digital media intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, power and technology.
SUZE KUNDU: She's the author, as many of you have probably read, of algorithms of oppression, how search engines reinforce racism. And that was published by NYU press. Now it's a best selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines. And she's written and spoken widely on issues of discrimination and technology bias with a huge list of places that she's been mentioned, including the guardian, the BBC, CNN international, USA today, wired time, full frontal with Samantha bee, the New York times, and a host of network news and podcasts.
SUZE KUNDU: But if that didn't make us all feel lazy enough in 2021, Dr. Nobel was also recognized as a MacArthur Foundation fellow, also known as the Genius Award for her groundbreaking work on algorithmic discrimination. And in 2022, she was the inaugural recipient of the NAACP archewell digital civil rights award. She's the founder and director of the recently launched center on race and digital justice, a groundbreaking effort that focuses on accountability and repair from accident and emerging digital harms.
SUZE KUNDU: She's also the co-founder and former director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet inquiry or committee and currently co-director of the minderoo initiative on technology and power. Dr. noble is a board member of the Civil rights initiative, or CCRC, serving those vulnerable to online harassment. The joint center for political and economic studies, America's black think tank and color of change, a civil rights advocacy organization.
SUZE KUNDU: In 2021, she founded a nonprofit called the equity engine, and that was designed to accelerate investment in companies, education and network, specifically driven by women in color. We are so honored to be hearing from Dr. noble today. And I'm very, very honored to. To hand the microphone and indeed the stage over to her. Congratulations, Dr. noble. We're excited to hear from you.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Thank you so much, Cindy. I'm really so thrilled to be here. As you mentioned, I was attending to a little one who is not feeling well this morning. So I, I think I panicked the organizers a little bit, but I promise I was coming for this because this is such an incredible award. I actually have the award here because I want people to see just how just so it's so beautiful.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And I put it out on display a couple of days ago when it arrived, and I didn't say anything to my family and my husband noticed it and picked it up and read it and he's like, you're just going to put an award like this on it, on the table and not tell anyone about it. So that's how I like to goof off with my family. But honestly, everyone are our family. The community of researchers that I work with, my colleagues at UCLA were all just so grateful to all of you for this incredible acknowledgment.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And so I thought that I would take this time that we have together because time is so precious and we don't get to be together in person the way we used to. And I thought that maybe I could use this time. To maybe. Set forth a provocation. So that's what I want to call this talk rather than kind of a lecture.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I'd really like to offer a provocation for our field. And so I'm calling this talk decolonizing standards, and it truly is a provocation. And so I want you to just go on a journey with me. And this is a journey that I've also been on over the past few years, really, since the writing of algorithms of repression. And I have to say thank you so much to this community for reading that work, for taking this work seriously.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So let me tell you a little bit about my own journey and how we got to this moment of talking about a lifetime of achievement, which let me also say I am 53, which is the year the age that Miles Conrad was when he passed. And I think about that. I've been thinking about that since I learned about this award and thinking about what it means to.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: to, to reach certain milestones in one's career when you think that you're really just barely getting started. And I'm sure that Miles Conrad himself thought he was just getting started in his work and in his contributions and then the legacy that he's left for all of us to work with and through. So I want to first just acknowledge that I'm here.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I'm joining you from Los Angeles. I'm on the gap relleno and tonka peoples lands who still Steward and care for this area that we have come to occupy. And I work in this unceded territory, and I think it's important for me to kind of open up my remarks today with that acknowledgement, because so many of the ways in which we move in the world and in our field and in our profession around information is kind of resting on a whole set of relationships that often go unseen, under, acknowledged, denied, ignored.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And so I think of my own work kind of in this context of entering the field of library and information science, which lets me just kind of share with you. For those of you who are not familiar with my work, I, I earned my PhD at the University of Illinois at urbana-champaign in the School of library and information science, as it was called at the time.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And at that time, I was in graduate school kind of during the rise of commercial search engines like yahoo! And Google in particular. I had just left the advertising industry. I came back to school later to graduate school later. I got my PhD when I was 41, and I was and I'm just going to warn you, the dog is moving around like she's going to start barking.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So just ignore. All right. I'm going I'm going to also try to ignore. And when I was in graduate school, I was thinking about the way in which people were talking about these new emergent technologies that we were all engaging with, like search engines. Now, at the time that I had come onto the internet, it was before the bibliographic user interface was before mosaic and Netscape, AOL and in the kind of in the tech space internet.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And of course, we all remember those of us who are of age remember that kind of information seeking environment was really about cultivated expertise, finding chat rooms where there might be people who were experts. In fact, my brother and sister-in-law met when my sister-in-law entered a chat room and said, does anybody in here know anything about the Civil war? Because I'm working on a paper.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And my brother was like a student of the Civil War. And so that's how they met. Right and here they are marrying more than 20 years later. So you think about what these sites of expertise offered, which is, of course, a clarity about the subjective nature of the information seeking. These were networking spaces in many ways, and this is the way many people, especially by the time I was coming back to graduate school, kind of think about the commercial web.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Now, we who work in information standards and classification and organization, we have a much more sophisticated understanding of the technologies, the protocols, the operability and lack of interoperability among different kinds of technical systems. Libraries in particular, right, are at the heart of some of the spaces that we study and look at. But when you think about the way the public generally engages with these emergent systems, they know so little about the structures and organization of these systems.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And in fact, over the last two decades, we really have seen people come to trust that the people working behind the scenes in the making of the systems that they are engaging with are making the right choices for them. Right that they have somehow figured out how to create the best 20 results that you could ever want out of millions of potential websites to display to you on the first page of a search result.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And part of the reason, of course, we know that. They trust. That is because oftentimes the things they find are aligned enough with what they're looking for. So if they're looking for something banal and meaningless, like. Is Starbucks open yet? Search results are likely going to give them the right answer. But of course, once we start to look at more sophisticated questions about society or knowledge that has many vantage points, many global vantage points, then we start to see where those results might in fact be incredibly subjective, have a very clear point of view, prioritize or privilege certain worldviews, let's say, over others.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And so this is one of the reasons that I find studying and looking at those kinds of banal, everyday spaces that the public is engaging with rather than what, let's say, experts or academics are contending with. And then kind of knowledge spheres we work in. I find those to be so important because these are the technologies that are reshaping the world, that are remaking the world, and that are what's available for the general public.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So let me take you through some of the things that I have been thinking about since the writing of that book Algorithms of oppression, things that I'm working on now that I think could have a contribution to our field and the way that we take on our serious commitments to things like diversity, equity and inclusion. And for me, those things start with some hard truths.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So I'm going to start with some kind of hard truths, and then I hope that that will give us some space. And I'm going to leave a little bit of time at the end of my remarks for you to drop questions. And of course, you can use the chat to have a conversation. I can't see it right now. I don't have my glasses on. So it's like super fine print. So you can have fun in the chat.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: While I'm having this conversation, first I want to point you to Shonda Prescott Weinstein's work. She has this incredible on medium, a decolonizing science reading list. And I just want to outfront, just acknowledge her and her work because I think it has been so important and transformative in opening up and furthering conversations about what does it mean to decolonise science.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And for me, I think about decolonizing standards or scientific standards or other kinds of information standards, because that feels like not only in my wheelhouse, but such an important set of logics upon which so many forms of knowledge rest. One of the things that I think is important to think about is that we are working in a field that has.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Not made its political commitments entirely clear at all times. So what do I mean by that? Well, first of all, we have these ideas about access to information and knowledge, and yet we have these institutions and efforts and histories that have been about opening up access to scientific information and to knowledge for some people, some very specific groups of people, some very specific nation states at the expense of and in the direct effort to preclude access to that information and that knowledge from others.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So what am I talking about when I say that I'm working on a book right now that I hope will be kind of an alternative history to the internet that we can read alongside the histories that we hold up and Revere in the United states, in particular, as these kind of great men of science, typically great white men of Science Standards and models and people that.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Somehow keeps us from seeing other people and ideas that were also kind of in the milieu over time. All right. One of the things we know, for example, and thank OU library school for this, we know that there are these kind of early antecedents to things like the internet that were incredibly important. And here I'm thinking about people like vannevar Bush and his early memex machine in 1945.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Some of you are going to know what I'm talking about. If you don't, then then you'll know. Before too long these projects of kind of early scientific librarians and information scientists were partially borne out of kind of the first two world wars. So you have, of course, during World War two in particular, major advances in science that lead to weapons and military advances that.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Threaten the planet, quite frankly, that are unbelievable. Right we know about the Manhattan projects. We know about Oppenheimer. There's a new movie out about making the h-bomb and then leaving the because it's a scientific inquiry that has to be pursued and leaving the politics and decisions about that to politicians and to me, this is so fascinating and interesting when we think about the world that we're living in right now, because so much of that early information science organization was about ensuring that scientists, for example, in what was then called the third world or among non-aligned movements, these are the nations of color around the world, all throughout Africa, colonized countries in South America, in the Caribbean, on the continent of Africa, in the Polynesian islands, places where in Asia.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Places where colonial powers were. Committed to ensuring that scientific knowledge around what could be advanced militarily would not fall into the hands of those scientists. And so this is, to me, incredibly, a really incredible and important moment. From which organizations like the National Science Foundation and enphase come into existence in the 1950s, which is so important because it's this kind of Cold War moment where the United States in particular and its allies are.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Are concerned about how scientific knowledge is moved around, who has access to it, and of course, making sure that certain peoples who are considered enemies of the United States do not have access to it. Now, what does that have to do with today? I think it's really interesting and it's important because we are living in a moment where we are dealing still with the effects of colonisation, of occupation, of Indigenous Peoples' lands.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And we as a field have struggled to kind of name our place and figure out our way to contribute to reimagining a more fair and a more just world. So for me, this is so fascinating and exciting to talk about with hundreds of my nerd friends. Probably not exciting to many more people outside of us, and maybe not even exciting to you.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: But I find this to be at the heart of what it means when we are talking about things like diversity, equity and inclusion, because those notions are kind of come out of a post-civil rights moment in the United states, which is also connected to these liberation movements around the world that are trying to reject colonization, that are trying to reject occupation, that are trying to reclaim control over their natural resources, that are trying to assert independence and liberation, and to have a fair and full footing with more powerful nation states, governments and peoples around the world.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And of course, my own personal legacy comes from my parents, who were part of the Civil rights movement. Who allied their own thinking and their own commitments in the United States to these broader sets of pan-africanist concerns or concerns about what it might be like to live in a world where people do not live under oppression in the United states, of course, at the moment, where in the 1950s and 1960s, where the scientific communities are responding to the Soviet union, putting spacecraft into the stratosphere, is that the right layer?
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Don't hold me to stratosphere. We have these kinds of incredible experiences, of unrest, of dissatisfaction, where the American public is saying, we want to live in a world where everyone has equal rights, civil rights, where women have equal rights, where women of color and Black women also have the right to vote. And and I think so much about what what it might have been like for us to interrogate our role as a community, as a scientific community, as a standards community, kind of in the view of the times that have really brought us to this moment.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So these are some of the things that I'm thinking about. These are some of the provocations that I want to kind of just like, you know. Fire some synapses with me on these ideas. Because what that does is it gives us. A completely different way of thinking about what our projects are in the world. And what we're truly working on. So take with me this journey of thinking about the moment that we live in now.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: We live in a moment where we have unprecedented global inequality, wealth and economic inequality since we have been keeping records of inequality. Every year, we outpace the year before in global economic inequality. We are living in a moment where scientific knowledge about how to solve that kind of problem is so incredibly important that we measure and understand things like quality of life around the world, along shared understandings of what a high quality of life means.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I know that for some people, a high quality of life is not getting to upgrade to the next version of an iPhone. And for some, it is. So we have to kind of contend with what does it mean to live on a planet that we share, where we are interconnected, we are interdependent, and our interests around the world have to be thought about in terms of quality of life and standards for quality of life.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And I think we play a role in. Contributing to those conversations. We are also living in a time where we have new conceptions of things like climate change. Now, I've already told you how old I am, so I don't have to pretend or play any games anymore. Despite all the hair dye, I remember the time when the way we talked about things like the environment or environmental catastrophe was we spoke in terms of things like increasing pollution or holes in the ozone layer.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And what we have learned from climate scientists, when you hear them speak now, their vocabularies about climate change, the places they go and study and think about the climate have completely changed. And part of the reason that is change has been by the demand that communities that have been overlooked by scientific interventions be included.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So now we have ways of thinking about climate change, where we center people, for example, who live in Polynesian islands that are in decline, that are going away because they are being flooded completely. We are centering people who are losing their places where they have lived for generations to. Fires to land that cannot grow food any longer to.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Changes that render the water either not potable or inaccessible. Places that were once pristine. Lush amazing places for people to live and make community for thousands of years no longer available to human beings. So this has really changed the way we think about. The use of science in prioritizing people who are most vulnerable to climate change.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: For me, this is, again, like a powerful example of what it means to decolonize climate science by prioritizing and putting those who would be most harmed or most affected at the center. So this is an example of that is underway for us to look at and to learn from. We also have issues and concerns about things like educational equity and access. I know, for example, where I live here in Los Angeles and Los Angeles Unified school district, when the pandemic hit of COVID 19, we had some 40,000 students who never once logged in and were able to continue to advance their education.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And so we have all these kind of complications around the models of delivery that we have developed that no longer make sense as we live in a changing world that will increasingly be vulnerable to things like viruses that affect millions of people around the world. So we have to think about what does it mean to make educational equity real? How do we make knowledge more available?
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I know that your students, for those of you who work with students, I know your students, like my students, don't just write their papers from the internet and Google searches. I know that's not happening. Definitely not happening. But for those who are using things like commercial search engines like Google or other search services to answer questions and to seek and find information, it's so incredibly important that we think about what does it mean that.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So much scientific research and knowledge production across the humanities, across the social sciences, the arts lives many times behind paywalls that only scholars and students and universities have access to. So we have a role to play in thinking about the changing nature of these systems that our own children are going through, that our neighbors children's are going through, that are in many ways being defunded, devalued and are in some places in cases, crumbling or unavailable.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And what is our role as information professionals, information scientists in remaking and opening up access to knowledge? One of the things that I thought was so interesting and of course, I study and watch what happens in search engines is that the most searched for information in a Google Search and Google searches is health related information. Now, this is so telling and so important for us to watch and to think about, because even for those of us who live in the United states, I know our friends in Canada and Europe don't understand how we're living.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So just bear with me as you hear me talk about this, because I know it's horrible to hear for those of you who have, you know, nationalized health care, we do not have that in the United States. And so you have and you see that the most searched for terms are terms about health and health care. And this, to me is so telling about what it means when people do not have access to health care services, that they go on WebMD and try to diagnose themselves and try to figure out.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And, of course, we know this is tied to the kind of billion wellness industry that is also fraught with lots of non scientific snake oil. Dangerous ideas about how to protect oneself includes. Including like. Like medicine. They get horses. I'm just going to leave it. OK so these are the kinds of opportunities that I think are before us.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Now, let me say a little bit about standardizing people, because this is kind of the world we are now, and we have spent hundreds of years as scientists organizing. As many things on Earth as we can. And in space that we have access to. Organizing them into elaborate scientific regimes about the world.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Ordering the world. And of course, this is. A very political as well set of processes that we know that also M&A from these earlier times that I've talked about under colonization, the elaborate kind of taxonomies of species on the planet, much of which was also used in service of. On organizing people into racist hierarchies.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: We know that this whether it's cranium, cranial measurement, measuring melanin in one's skin, in the skin of peoples, looking at kind of the width of one's face, all of these things, brain size, trying to use those kinds of eugenicist scientific markers to determine and declare who is the superior class of human being.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: All of those kinds of things are also part of these history histories of standardized information's, standardized science. And again, these are to me, the most interesting places to look, because they have kind of overdetermined in many ways, the world that we're living in now. They've they've shaped and created the environment and the world that we inhabit now. And we are doing so much work to refute, dislodge, speak back to disprove these kinds of racist and sexist and heteronormative ideas about the standards by which we measure people.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: We are we are also in this moment where we are contending with not only the standardization, but the making of models that are used to organize human beings and determine their worthiness or lack of worthiness in terms of access to all kinds of services and all kinds of systems. So, for example, we have models that are used to recognize our faces.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Facial recognition models. We have models that are used to determine our credit worthiness. We have models that are used to determine whether we will be successful in college or whether we should be admitted to college. We have models that are used to determine whether we should get a mortgage or a loan. And many of these models are increasingly moving from, let's say, algorithmic formulations based on kind of course, we know long histories of flawed data sets, data sets that have precluded people and that are flattening the richness of our lived experiences.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: But we are now moving into an era where. Machine learning algorithms. Machine learning is taking in and ingesting so much data that it is in fact sorting us in all kinds of different ways that we maybe will not even be able to intervene upon or make sense of. And of course, this is we look at some of these projects that have been recently unleashed and everyone here is talking about GPT and openai, but it's really so imperative that we think about kind of the underlying logics of social organization, of standardization that is happening, that will classify people in or out of different kinds of opportunities.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And for me, this is actually the place of my life's work. I mean, I feel that these are some of the most rich and interesting questions that are taking place at a time when we do not have. Other systematic. Protections or laws or customs or practices to help us contend with corral governance make sense of the consequences of so many of these new projects.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And so this is a place where I also think that our field has so much to offer. We really we should be at the forefront of not just kind of passively letting our work in service of all kinds of colonial projects of the past that we may not have even knew we were working in service of. And I, I tell my students often at UCLA that kind of once we know we have a responsibility to kind of work with the knowledge that we are introduced to and to kind of contend with it and grapple with it.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: It doesn't mean that I have a prescriptive answer. I think what we are engaged in together is a process of figuring out what has come before us, what have we inherited, what are we contributing to, how might we remake some of the assumptions upon which we do our work? How might we reimagine business models? For example, are there business models upon which publishers and other kinds of libraries, and other kinds of institutions can make knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, accessible to the world, while also making space for new epistemology, new ways of thinking, ways of kind of both critiquing what's happened, but being more expansive about the kinds of future that we want.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: These are not unconscious actions. These are actually opportunities that we can embrace. And so for me, these are the kinds of things that I think about as I think about what does it mean to decolonize our field? What does it mean to decolonize standards? It means that we kind of question the assumptions upon which the scientific world is organized. We reimagine new possibilities.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And of course, nowhere is there more of a sensibility that science evolves, that people evolve, that we discover and are introduced to new things. We observe new things, and we incorporate those. And so we don't have to be static. We don't have a static field. We don't have a static orientation to the world that we live in.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I guess the last thing that I want to say is that we are living in this kind of moment where there's so much consolidation of power, who gets to organize knowledge and information, who controls knowledge and information and. These are difficult questions that we're grappling with. I mean, in Europe and the EU, we see more regulation and more concern than we've seen in the United States.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So far about what does it mean for US companies to control knowledge and information regimes in other parts of the world? In particular, Europe has been concerned with this. We have narratives about the continent of Africa. We have narratives about South America that are narrow and that don't properly account for the voices and the concerns coming from an emanating from these parts of the world.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So I find it to be such an incredible moment to be alive in our field and doing this work, because we have an opportunity to be incredibly expansive about how we think about things like diversity, equity, inclusion and access. We could actually re-imagine these words in a way that centers the concerns of people who have both been victims of past practices, but also who have incredible ideas about how to find a way forward into a more fairer and a more just world.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: At the end of the day, I think that. I'm nowhere near a lifetime of achievement. I feel like I'm just starting to have. The kinds of conversations that are important to me. And we're just barely scratching the surface. I mean, so many technologies and systems are changing. Just as we start to understand them, they evolve.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: New insurance, new players come into the marketplace. Different voices get to emerge and move forward and take the microphone for a minute. And so I'm very grateful that you have given me this time this bit of microphone sharing to talk about some truly some provocations that we have for our field. And I embrace this award because I think that, you know, for you to give it to me, knowing the things that I write about and the things that I work on, to me signals that there's a great opportunity to kind of.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Bring hard conversations into the foreground to. Rethink how we organize and disseminate and share knowledge and information around the world. How to put science and information and knowledge in service of the most pressing issues that there are. It's so humbling, I have to say, to just be able to share some of these ideas with you.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I hope that I have not broken the meeting and that you're still here with me and that you will not regret having given me this award. So thank you very much. I think I'll leave it there. And I'm happy to entertain a conversation or questions with you. That was fantastic.
TODD CARPENTER: First of all, thank you so much for your ideas. And you have absolutely not broken the meeting. You have reinforced many of the things that we are trying to do and to say organizationally and not only with this conference. So thank you. It is such an honor. And as someone who is age, age adjacent, right. You know, Lifetime Achievement doesn't necessarily mean that you won't continue to do more.
TODD CARPENTER: And we are looking forward to everything that you will continue to do. Want to encourage people. If you have any questions for Dr. noble, please put them in the Q&A. The chat is zooming by pretty quickly. I won't ever be able to capture them. They're there. I do have my glasses on.
TODD CARPENTER: It's not that tiny for me, but it is. It is pretty moving pretty quickly. I thought it was fantastic. The way you framed. The consolidated, the power of organization and the practices that have gone on for hundreds of years in terms of taxonomy development. Putting things into boxes was some of the things that Dr. Weinberger talked about yesterday.
TODD CARPENTER: Are there ways in which we can use technology the way we can use our power as an ISO to help. Create spaces for those different vocabularies and spaces in which they can communicate with each other so that, you know, you don't have to use the standard Western European taxonomy for, you know. How books are classified, that there are ways in which we can.
TODD CARPENTER: How do you think we can best maintain that diversity of our world? And is there a way in which we can help move that forward?
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I mean, it's such a great question. I remember once talking to a group of librarians and they asked me, you know, do we just throw out the. You know, the catalog guys organized and start over. And I said, you know, and I was thinking about.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: You know, the way in which. You know, our colleagues have challenged us to kind of clear the catalog and think about what does it mean to I'm blanking, I want to grab this book and give you the name of it. So I'm just trying to think of it while we're talking. That's about kind of wearing the catalog and wearing the library, but it's like we can keep these legacy systems, I think, in intact.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And of course, we know we are always building and evolving systems that also or taxonomies that challenge them. So that we have many vantage points. I mean, one of the things that I think is so and I try to talk about this in my work is like we need many vantage points into knowledge and we need to also be able to see what is in dialogue, who are we in dialogue with?
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Right so we don't actually have to be completely oppositional, although sometimes we will. We don't. But we could think of like what would the anti-racist catalog look like? How would it help us make sense of the history of knowledge that we have so that we can have the right iframes on what we're looking at? When I was in library school, Dr. Lee Estabrook was one of my professors.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Some of her. And I remember she introduced us to the. I just have like. Like brain fog, like crazy right now. Atlas to the Atlas. And many of you might know that this was at one time considered the most important medical textbook that had the most intricate drawings of the human body kind of under the skin.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And it was used. It was kind of out of World War two. It was used widely in medical schools and kind of the most beautiful illustrated drawings you'd ever seen of the human body. Well, we then learned, of course, that the atlas, as a horrific project of the Nazi government was had used the cadavers of Jewish people who had been murdered by Nazis.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And so this. The question is posed to the young library science student how do we catalog? This what is this artifact, this atlas? And, you know, I think we resolved that it could both be a medical text. It could also be cataloged under. You know, the Holocaust.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: It could also be cataloged as under human rights violations. It could have many ways that we could iframe that artifact that help us make sense of what it truly is, so that as we uncover it in the medical library, we don't just relate to it as a medical textbook with like devoid of the atrocious of what it actually is to. And I think those kinds of things are very, very valuable for us because for me and in my own human value system, I think that we are losing more and more of our human ANSI through these kinds of systems that really flatten what we're engaging with.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: It flattens knowledge, it flattens artifacts, the digital flattens things that were formerly complex and rich. And that seems like a horrible place that we might evolve to, is to lose the richness of our humanity. What we would need is for knowledge and our knowledge systems to help us reclaim our humanity. So that we, in fact, don't have things like the Holocaust occur. Definitely since it wouldn't be a technology meeting if I didn't ask you, you've already raised this.
TODD CARPENTER: We won't mention the any particular a.I., but I'd be interested to hear from your perspective. What's going. Search and discovery and a lot of human experience online is so much more intermediated by machines. And I expect with natural language processing and AI being incorporated into Bing and Google and other services, I'd be interested to hear your perspective on the idea that not only will the ais.
TODD CARPENTER: Incorporate, presume to know what you're looking for. And then presume to know what best matches what you're looking for. But we'll then take that a step further, analyze it, and present to you a summary that, you know, here's a natural language summary of the actual content that you wanted, whether it's accurate or not. Kind of where do you how can we help to shape that environment where we're going to be reliant on these machines that are problematic in several different.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Directions Yeah. Well, there's a couple of things happening here. First, I think we are going to have to contend with the way in which. Our engagement with these kinds of technologies are changing our brain. And anyone who is teaching students right now knows that.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Students, for example, have a very hard time reading a whole book. It's very hard for many students, not all students, but a lot of students struggle because they're used to scrolling, reading very, very short summaries. And so that's a skill set that we're going to have to contend with. Are we are we losing something, which I think is I told you the dog she eventually was going to pop off.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And then there's kind of these questions about. So the demand. Do people just want, like, give me the. Give me the point of everything. And certainly there is a profound socialization underway in countries and places where people use these kinds of technologies. And I think there's a lot to unpack there that we could spend time with.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So one of the things we see in our field is that we are often under pressure to adapt to what the major dominant market leaders are. Let me say major market advertisers. Let me be really clear what their interests are. And so you see libraries, for example, wanting to make interfaces to the catalog look like a Google search box. Right or other types of search boxes.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I mean, this is like old I mean, 20 years old. But that that pressure came and we responded. The field responded. So I think we have some of those kinds of challenges. But I think if we look ahead, we'll also see there's something interesting happening with Joneses right now who are not actually interested in search results. Now, you know, is this my fault?
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I don't know. But but they just trust, you know, they they're kind of like, oh, maybe we're not sure if this ranking is right. They're a little more aware than previous generations that something's something's going on. And they also know from their own experience of working with things like social media, they know what shadow banning is or they believe that that's a thing.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: They certainly understand like algorithmic amplification or suppression. I think that's a better way to put it, like getting a boost or not getting boosted. So they understand kind of these politics of how these systems work. A lot of people are very much more aware. And so I've been finding it. So fascinating to see younger people going to places like tiktok or Instagram Reels to hear what other people have to say about a thing.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Trusting what other people say and what their experiences are more than they are going to trust, let's say, a website. So this is very interesting to study. I mean, we have a lot of things that we should be watching and that has to do with. Then to what degree will the semantic web be able to kind of make sense of all of this content that's moving all of this user generated content that's everywhere, and then summarize it and feed it back to us or adapt will search adapt to these new ways of information sharing?
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I think it will have to I'm sure I have it on some decent information that this is a big stressor for Google is the kind of way in which the Semantic Web is maybe not exactly how I don't know that people really expected younger people to start engaging or leaving search behind, let's say ignoring search to some degree. So these things are like fascinating, important questions for the scholars, but also for practitioners to be thinking about.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And I think now also has a role to play in being on the cutting edge, especially when it comes to technologies who are trying to think about interoperability of systems and like containing and corralling what we know as human beings, and then figuring out what to save, what will get saved and what will be prioritized. You know, I didn't mention so much in my provocation, but I will say we're going to have to think about and contend with.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: What does it mean that we're saving everything, you know, that all the data is being saved and that it's getting harder and harder to disambiguate what's important from what's not important? And that curatorial function that we have played as a field feels like it needs a refresh and need some action around thinking. Thinking through that too. Yeah, several questions come in from the participants.
TODD CARPENTER: Thank you for that question here for you. Are there any technologies being implemented in information organization that are kind of reimagining access from a lens that you're aware of? Any technologies being implemented. I mean, I'm sure there are. And, you know, I will probably the most experimental thing that I have come across just and this again, I can't speak for everything that's happening out here because I have no idea, honestly.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: But I have seen there's an organization in California called feminist AI, and it has been very interesting for the last couple of years to watch them take things like my work and try to imagine what it would mean to have things like a feminist search or to have slow search, right? Or to kind of like really like they really are inverting so many ideas around something like search, deconstructing and and then building up new kinds of technologies.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So it's been interesting to watch them. I would look them up feminist. I, they definitely, I think are centering in their work for sure and all the way from like, you know, architectural conceptualizations of how we do search. Flexibility modularity you know again less standardizing to one particular model, dominant model, but thinking in much more kind of fluid ways.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And I've been to some of their events where they've done this kind of bending of my work and it's mind blowing. So I think that's interesting. The one thing I the book I was trying to remember earlier when I was saying querying our way of thinking is Melissa Adler, who you might some of you might know Melissa Adler's querying the catalog where theory and the politics of correction.
TODD CARPENTER: And I think that's another instructive book for us. Another question has come in. What are some of the challenges that you face with regard to your efforts to have people of color included and recognized in the programs and processes in your field? Any thoughts in that?
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Well this is a tough one because I think I'm one of like, I don't know, like 20 or less black PhDs in library and information science.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: At least like last time I counted, I was trying to account with a couple of other PhDs in our field. And so as and large, as a field, we are not diverse, at least we certainly do not have a lot of black representation in our field and. And so, you know, the field struggles also, I think, in my experience with these kinds of conversations.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So I have faced a lot of challenges talking about this work professionally in academia, although my work, I will tell you, has been resoundingly supported by librarians and information professionals and technologists. So that's interesting. Between this kind of rub between academic information science and the practice where it's been like no challenge and it's been absolutely wonderful and this award is like evidence of that.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I'm just like so moving. So I think, you know, without black and Latino, Latino and Asian-American and lgbtqia faculty in information schools around the world, I think we will continue to produce a very narrow kind of set of scholars and who are interested in whatever they're interested in, which may not be what I'm talking about today.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So I think that has to do something with it. I think also that the field has been fairly insular when we're talking about things like decolonization or equity or civil rights or justice. We should be interfacing with the fields in ethnic studies and gender studies where the most prolific scholars in the world are working out of those kinds of fields. Right sociology, history, Africana Studies.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So that means we should be doing much more engagement, more interdisciplinarity. I mean, I now at this stage of my career, my faculty appointment is in gender studies, in African-American studies because I'm post tenure and I can do that. And I want to be located in the heart of conversations intellectually with my peers who are talking about these things and researching and writing and are on the cutting edge of thinking about these things, because those people have not been in my traditional field of Information Studies or information science.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So we have work to do in certainly in the academic organizations. And we I think we again, if you think back to like the provocations, how could we even go about doing this work without the knowledge that lives? In other areas of expertise. And I think this is one of the reasons why we're kind of flagging as a field around these issues.
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah so certainly a lot of work left to do. And I hope in, in tiny measure some of the things that meso does with regards to our Dia issues or DEIA activities are trying to help move the community forward in our own way or we're trying. Can I say just something to that, please? I mean, I think these declarations by so about a commitment to are extremely powerful.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And other organizations are watching when we do or don't acknowledge the incredible power of our field in transforming the world. Right so we do. You know, I think if we did anything around. These values, it would be making them more and more visible. And so that nice I was doing that is very important. We should not underestimate.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: What not doing that does and says right. It says a lot, especially in the day and age that we're living in, where there's profound violence and war and, you know, police brutality and all of the things that we witness, we have a role to play. And I think, you know, I mean, standards about AI are being decided. Where are we in the room? Are we having the conversation?
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Are we bringing the knowledge to bear that we know about discriminatory technical systems? We know. So we should be in these spaces, in places advocating. And that is an expression of our commitment to as well as hiring people and centering people of color who often are pushed to the margin.
TODD CARPENTER: I cannot think of a better way to end this conversation. Dr. noble, thank you so much. Congratulations again. This has been a fantastic a fantastic hour. Really appreciate all of your contributions to our field and our community. And like I said, this is a waypoint. I hope you continue along this very important work and advance our community in the ways that you have.
TODD CARPENTER: Thank you so much. Thank you, all of you. I really appreciate you. And I am honored. Great thank you. That brings our award ceremony to a close end of our miles Conrad lecture. Thank you all. And we will continue the program later this afternoon.
TODD CARPENTER: Thank you.
Segment:0 .
TODD CARPENTER: This is the 2023 NISO awards portion of the NISO Plus conference.
TODD CARPENTER: I hope you all have been enjoying the meeting so far. This was in 2020. Some photos of the luncheon that we had. Maybe at some point in the future we will reunite for a luncheon for our awards ceremony. This is one of the things that I truly enjoy, one of the highlights of my year to recognize various people in the community who are participating in our work who really.
TODD CARPENTER: Really make what nice. So is the community that we are the difference that we make is all. Part of. A vision of the participants and the leaders that engage in our work.
TODD CARPENTER: I'd like to take a few minutes before we get going, just again to thank our sponsors. There are a large part of how we are able to make this an affordable meeting, a globally inclusive meeting. So when I run through and thank them again, our gigabyte sponsor, our larger sponsor is Cadmore Media. Thank you so much to them. Our megabytes sponsors Figshare, Digital Science.
TODD CARPENTER: Our kilobyte sponsors Access Innovation, ASTM, ASME, Bowker Clarivate, Ex Libris, Crossref, EBSCO, and Silverchair. Our byte sponsors the American Chemical Society, Atypon, Chorus, Duke University press, Edaptive Technologies, Project Muse, Scholastica, SPIE, the Stony Brook Stony Brook University libraries. And also our bit level sponsors Aries,
TODD CARPENTER: The University of California, Berkeley Library Copyright Clearance Center, Dryad, Elsevier, iOS press, Highwire Press (part of MPS), Kriyadocs, the Modern Language Association, OpenAthens, Springer Nature and the University of Delaware library museums and press. I want to thank all of these sponsors so much for contributing to helping us turn this and make this meeting a success.
TODD CARPENTER: As I said, we're an organization of volunteers. We, the nicest staff, are fairly small and concentrated and ambitious, but we by no means could do all of the things that we do as an organization if it were not for the many hundreds of volunteers who contribute both on our working groups, but also on the leadership level, reviewing our standards, but also helping to put this meeting together Jason mentioned these two groups at the outset of the conference.
TODD CARPENTER: Want to thank them again for providing guidance and really on the ground support. In each of the elements, in each of the program, elements of our conference, our advisory committee. Thank you so much to the advisory committee who provide support not only for the conference. But overall our NISO Plus programming. And then specifically for this conference, the planning committee, who helped put together the sessions, organize the sessions, moderate many of the sessions, and contribute to the great program that we've been able to put together this week.
TODD CARPENTER: It is incredibly important that we note and acknowledge the nice of board of directors and. Their many contributions to us running as an organization. Want to see. I think Maria Stanton should.
TODD CARPENTER: Be on the list. I want to make sure that I want to bring her up onto the stage as she had a little something to say. Just a second. I need to. Make allow. There you. There is that. Maria, you should be able to join us here.
MARIA STANTON: Yes thank you, Todd. To everyone. Yes, I'm Maria Stanton, the chair of the NISO board. And I realize this is day two, but on behalf of the board, I want to welcome everyone to nice Plus and thank you for your active participation in our sessions. It's been wonderful to engage with the participants during the Zoom conversations, and I would also like to echo Todd's comments and thank the entire program planning committee, all of the conference volunteers and the speakers for their generous contribution of time and talents to make this a successful time together.
MARIA STANTON: And finally, I want to express the board's gratitude to the entire NISO staff, to Todd, to Nettie, Kendra, Jason, Kimberly, Lisa, Sarah and Mary Beth for their tireless commitments on behalf of our community and on behalf of NISO's mission and vision of a world where we all benefit from the unfettered exchange of information. So thank you, Todd, and I'll turn it back to you now. Thanks, Maria.
TODD CARPENTER: And this photo is actually missing a few people from the NISO staff Jason Griffey and Mary Beth Barilla weren't able to join us. This was our holiday celebration a couple of weeks ago. Towards the end of twenty-two. And you know, in this environment, it's always such a pleasure and a joy to get together and come together since most of our staff is virtual and isn't based here in Baltimore.
TODD CARPENTER: So I'm going to pass it now to Kimberly Graham, who is director of educational programs and our desire advocate to prevent to present the Scholarship award winners for this year. Kimberly, to you. Thank you, Todd. I'm so tickled to have this opportunity, this privilege, to introduce our 2023 Scholarship award winners just as a bit of background.
KIMBERLY GRAHAM: The Scholarship program was established in an effort to support nice's strategic goal to improve diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in our community. Indeed, the first cohort was awarded and introduced at the inaugural nice Plus 2020 conference, which as many of you might remember, was in person. And as Todd said, hopefully we will get to do so again. Since then, we've been virtual and so we haven't been able to meet in person with our Scholarship awardees.
KIMBERLY GRAHAM: But nonetheless, we have continued this tradition and it has been one of the most rewarding aspects of our program and conference with each year and each new cohort. Cohort nice to have been rewarded really with the voices, perspectives and efforts of Scholarship awardees who have joined committees. Working groups and served as speakers on many programs.
KIMBERLY GRAHAM: I think it's safe to say that it has been a rewarding relationship for all. Todd, can you advance the slide for me, please? This program as it enters its fourth year. We're pleased to have an impressive new cohort to introduce to you, and we are grateful to Digital Science for being our generous sponsor for this program. And we also tord, if you could do one more, I want to thank our Scholarship review committee for their time and their deliberation.
KIMBERLY GRAHAM: And considering all of the applicants, we had a really great response. We look forward to each year growing with applications as this program becomes more and more established and the conference becomes more and more established, and that review process takes time. So thank you to our review committee as well. We after reviewing everything. Boiled it down to 15 worthy applicants.
KIMBERLY GRAHAM: And so without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to them. The first is Doyin Adenuga. He's the electronic resources librarian at Houghton University. Joanna Bailey, the course Reserve's manager at Western Washington University. Whitney Bates Gomez, electronic and continuing resources librarian for Georgia State University. Janaynne do Amaral, postdoctoral research associate with the School of Information sciences at University of Illinois, Urbana, Chicago.
KIMBERLY GRAHAM: Champaign. Tarenta Daniels, who is an mlis graduate student at San Jose State University and an assistant operations officer with the US Navy. Amir Rabiya el-Chidiac is a diversity resident research and instruction librarian with Susquehanna University. Stanislava Gardasevic is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant instructor at the library Information School with the University of Hawaii at Mona Minoa.
KIMBERLY GRAHAM: Sorry, Rosy Salman Khan, library assistant with the Indira Gandhi Institute of development research. Grace Kim, electronic resources librarian, Nevada State College. Nancy Kwangwa, scholarly communication and publishing manager with the University of Zimbabwe. And Mubanga Lumpah, senior library assistant at the University of Zambia library.
KIMBERLY GRAHAM: Shima Moradi instruction and research librarian with the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences. Catarina Reed is an instructional support associate with Stony Brook University. And Milo Santamaria is an LIS graduate student at San Jose University and a webmaster with youth facts.
KIMBERLY GRAHAM: Sonali Sugrim is the electronic resources librarian with Queens College at Cuny. Thank you all so very much. We are so excited to have you as our Scholarship awardees and part of our nice community. And thank you again to Digital Science for supporting this program.
TODD CARPENTER: I have been so pleased and impressed and honored to include the Scholarship winners in much of NISO's activities. They have been amazing cohorts over the years. And with this program, we're trying not only to. Highlight and elevate some astounding people in our community, but also try and build diversity and inclusivity into our work and really benefit from their knowledge and expertise.
TODD CARPENTER: And this program has been such a success and I've been so happy with its output, with the outcomes that have been associated with it. So congratulations to all of the awardees. The next award that we provide is the ann-marie Cunningham service award, and it was established in 1994 to honor and face members who routinely went above and beyond the normal call of duty to serve the organization.
TODD CARPENTER: It is named after Anne Marie Cunningham, who, while working with the A&E service, biological abstracts and the Institute for scientific and information. Both now part of the nisa member clarivate analytics. She was a tireless and dedicated and face volunteer. She ultimately served as and faces executive director from 1991 to 1994, when she unfortunately died unexpectedly.
TODD CARPENTER: We are nice so as pleased to continue to present this award and to honor nice volunteers who've shown the same sort of commitment to serving our organization and our community this year. I am so pleased to award the 2023 Ann Marie Cunningham Service Award to Robert Wheeler at ASME. Robert has more than 20 years of experience in STM publishing, ranging from front end production works through online publishing and almost everything in between.
TODD CARPENTER: Currently in his role as director of publishing technologies at asmi, he focuses on all aspects of codes and standards. Publishing previously worked at AIP as product manager and operations manager, the online publishing platform citation and the production operations support manager for their in-house typesetting division. Prior to that, at Springer Kluwer academic, as part of a small team, he was devoted to the planning operation and implementation of electronic initiatives across the enterprise, spearheading a number of projects focused around XML content digital workflows.
TODD CARPENTER: Robert has made a tremendous has been a tremendous force within NISO in recent years. He is always ready to jump in, take on new projects, and he is always a vocal champion of NISO and nice work. He has been convener and co-chair of two nice working groups. He is one of the co organizers of the standards technology forum.
TODD CARPENTER: He's a member of the NISO content collection management topic committee acting as liaison not only for the board and the architecture committee within NISO, but also as liaison between the two working groups that he is co-chair of. He also serves as a member of the board of directors. I am so pleased to recognize Robert's contributions and it is my pleasure to present this award to Robert.
ROBERT WHEELER: Robert, you. Now have the stage is congratulations. Thank you. I'm honored and humbled. And I'm very grateful for this and the experience and relationships gained through NISO work. And of course, there's the impact of what nisoor does. So thank you. Thank you, Robert.
TODD CARPENTER: NISO also has a very long tradition of providing and recognizing distinguished leaders in our community and their contributions over their careers. We do this through the NISO Fellows award. And in 2023, I am honored to recognize Jill O'Neil as the 2023.
TODD CARPENTER: NISO fellow. Those of you involved in NISO will know that she has served NISO for the last seven years as director of content. She has led educational programs over those seven years. And in that time, NISO has put on more than 246 separate events. That works out to about one every other week.
TODD CARPENTER: We also hosted 14 in-person forums as well as a number of annual conferences in that time, as well as director of content. A title she assumed in 2018. NISO published 56 issues of NISO's monthly newsletter, and she managed to get them out on time, usually without many complaints. Apart from my own delays in getting that introduction to her on a monthly basis.
TODD CARPENTER: Prior to joining NISO, she had a long and distinguished career at NFAIS, where she helped organize 15 annual conferences as the director of planning and communications, as well as dozens of other online programs at end phase. Previously she had a. Roles as a writer of corporate communications at Thomson scientific and in the Institute for scientific information. She was also a supervisor in the marketing information department at Elsevier.
TODD CARPENTER: In addition to all of the writing that she's done within interphase and nice, she's published more than a dozen peer reviewed articles, several dozen posts as a chef in the Scholarly Kitchen hosted by the Society for Scholarly Publishing. On a regular basis. Over the years, she has directly or indirectly touched the lives and careers of literally thousands of people, providing them important understanding and information about our community.
TODD CARPENTER: NISO and NFAIS were made so much better organizations because of her involvement, and she has influenced the state of the art through many ways in her many contributions. It is such an honor to recognize Jill and her many contributions over the years with the 2023 nice Fellows award. Before we move on.
TODD CARPENTER: Just want to highlight again that we are set settled on dates for 2024 for those of you on the lookout can put this on to your calendar and ISO will be hosting nice Plus in some fashion between February 12th and 15th, 2024. We will be providing community more information about the form, location and specific dates. Later this spring.
TODD CARPENTER: Finally, one of the highlights of the nice hope conference is the presentation of the Miles Conrad lecture. For those of you not familiar with the background of this award, it has been presented by the National Federation of abstracting and indexing services since the 1960s and since the. Merger of NISO and NFAIS in 2019. NISO has been continuing this trend tradition as a core element of the terms of our NISO Plus conference.
TODD CARPENTER: The Miles Conrad award. Was named after. In the G Miles Conrad, who was director of biological abstracts now bioscience previews, which is currently distributed by clarivate analytics. In 1957, Conrad organized a meeting of 14 A&E services to discuss the implications of new government investments in science communications following the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union that led to the formation of North face the following year.
TODD CARPENTER: In 1958. In 1964. Miles Conrad passed away suddenly at the age of 53, in subsequently the infamous board of directors established an annual lecture series named in his honor that would be a central feature of the annual conference. This award has been presented to a number of industry leaders over the years Tim Collins at PepsiCo information services.
TODD CARPENTER: Dame Lynne Brindley, the CEO of British Library. Frederick Kilgore, the founding director of oclc. Robert Massey, the president of chemical abstract services. Bella hassani, co-founder of silver Platter information. Rob Snyder, the founder and chairman of Cambridge information group. In the last several years, it's been awarded to Jim Neal, University librarian at Columbia university, Heather Joseph, the executive director of spark, and Patricia Brennan, the director of the National Library of Medicine.
TODD CARPENTER: I'm so pleased to award the 2023 Miles Conrad award to Dr. Safiya Noble for her lifetime of achievements to the information community. Through her writing, speaking and advocacy, Dr. Noble has drawn attention to the extensive biases and embedded racism that exist in many technologies that we use not only in scholarly research, but increasingly in the wider community as well.
TODD CARPENTER: This awareness has led to the beginnings of change in some areas of technology. There is much work to do moving forward, but Dr. Noble is driven change and hopefully advancing the banner of inclusivity in technological applications, particularly as it relates to search and discovery. It is for this reason that the NISO board of directors is awarding Dr. Noble the Miles Conrad lecture award this year.
TODD CARPENTER: So excited to welcome her to the stage. I'd now like to pass the microphone to. Suze Kundu, who is at digital science, who will introduce Dr. Noble.
Segment:1 Dr. Noble Introduction.
TODD CARPENTER: Thank you so much, Todd. It is a huge honor for us to be supporting this and for such an eminent researcher to be awarded this amazing award.
SUZE KUNDU: Now, Dr. Nobel has just let me know that she has been watching and tending to her little son, who is not very well. So we are even more honored that she is able to join us today. But that is not the only important role that she plays. Dr. Sophia umoja noble is an internet studies scholar whose work in both sociological and interdisciplinary ways focuses on the way that digital media intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, power and technology.
SUZE KUNDU: She's the author, as many of you have probably read, of algorithms of oppression, how search engines reinforce racism. And that was published by NYU press. Now it's a best selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines. And she's written and spoken widely on issues of discrimination and technology bias with a huge list of places that she's been mentioned, including the guardian, the BBC, CNN international, USA today, wired time, full frontal with Samantha bee, the New York times, and a host of network news and podcasts.
SUZE KUNDU: But if that didn't make us all feel lazy enough in 2021, Dr. Nobel was also recognized as a MacArthur Foundation fellow, also known as the Genius Award for her groundbreaking work on algorithmic discrimination. And in 2022, she was the inaugural recipient of the NAACP archewell digital civil rights award. She's the founder and director of the recently launched center on race and digital justice, a groundbreaking effort that focuses on accountability and repair from accident and emerging digital harms.
SUZE KUNDU: She's also the co-founder and former director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet inquiry or committee and currently co-director of the minderoo initiative on technology and power. Dr. noble is a board member of the Civil rights initiative, or CCRC, serving those vulnerable to online harassment. The joint center for political and economic studies, America's black think tank and color of change, a civil rights advocacy organization.
SUZE KUNDU: In 2021, she founded a nonprofit called the equity engine, and that was designed to accelerate investment in companies, education and network, specifically driven by women in color. We are so honored to be hearing from Dr. noble today. And I'm very, very honored to. To hand the microphone and indeed the stage over to her. Congratulations, Dr. noble. We're excited to hear from you.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Thank you so much, Cindy. I'm really so thrilled to be here. As you mentioned, I was attending to a little one who is not feeling well this morning. So I, I think I panicked the organizers a little bit, but I promise I was coming for this because this is such an incredible award. I actually have the award here because I want people to see just how just so it's so beautiful.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And I put it out on display a couple of days ago when it arrived, and I didn't say anything to my family and my husband noticed it and picked it up and read it and he's like, you're just going to put an award like this on it, on the table and not tell anyone about it. So that's how I like to goof off with my family. But honestly, everyone are our family. The community of researchers that I work with, my colleagues at UCLA were all just so grateful to all of you for this incredible acknowledgment.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And so I thought that I would take this time that we have together because time is so precious and we don't get to be together in person the way we used to. And I thought that maybe I could use this time. To maybe. Set forth a provocation. So that's what I want to call this talk rather than kind of a lecture.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I'd really like to offer a provocation for our field. And so I'm calling this talk decolonizing standards, and it truly is a provocation. And so I want you to just go on a journey with me. And this is a journey that I've also been on over the past few years, really, since the writing of algorithms of repression. And I have to say thank you so much to this community for reading that work, for taking this work seriously.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So let me tell you a little bit about my own journey and how we got to this moment of talking about a lifetime of achievement, which let me also say I am 53, which is the year the age that Miles Conrad was when he passed. And I think about that. I've been thinking about that since I learned about this award and thinking about what it means to.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: to, to reach certain milestones in one's career when you think that you're really just barely getting started. And I'm sure that Miles Conrad himself thought he was just getting started in his work and in his contributions and then the legacy that he's left for all of us to work with and through. So I want to first just acknowledge that I'm here.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I'm joining you from Los Angeles. I'm on the gap relleno and tonka peoples lands who still Steward and care for this area that we have come to occupy. And I work in this unceded territory, and I think it's important for me to kind of open up my remarks today with that acknowledgement, because so many of the ways in which we move in the world and in our field and in our profession around information is kind of resting on a whole set of relationships that often go unseen, under, acknowledged, denied, ignored.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And so I think of my own work kind of in this context of entering the field of library and information science, which lets me just kind of share with you. For those of you who are not familiar with my work, I, I earned my PhD at the University of Illinois at urbana-champaign in the School of library and information science, as it was called at the time.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And at that time, I was in graduate school kind of during the rise of commercial search engines like yahoo! And Google in particular. I had just left the advertising industry. I came back to school later to graduate school later. I got my PhD when I was 41, and I was and I'm just going to warn you, the dog is moving around like she's going to start barking.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So just ignore. All right. I'm going I'm going to also try to ignore. And when I was in graduate school, I was thinking about the way in which people were talking about these new emergent technologies that we were all engaging with, like search engines. Now, at the time that I had come onto the internet, it was before the bibliographic user interface was before mosaic and Netscape, AOL and in the kind of in the tech space internet.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And of course, we all remember those of us who are of age remember that kind of information seeking environment was really about cultivated expertise, finding chat rooms where there might be people who were experts. In fact, my brother and sister-in-law met when my sister-in-law entered a chat room and said, does anybody in here know anything about the Civil war? Because I'm working on a paper.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And my brother was like a student of the Civil War. And so that's how they met. Right and here they are marrying more than 20 years later. So you think about what these sites of expertise offered, which is, of course, a clarity about the subjective nature of the information seeking. These were networking spaces in many ways, and this is the way many people, especially by the time I was coming back to graduate school, kind of think about the commercial web.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Now, we who work in information standards and classification and organization, we have a much more sophisticated understanding of the technologies, the protocols, the operability and lack of interoperability among different kinds of technical systems. Libraries in particular, right, are at the heart of some of the spaces that we study and look at. But when you think about the way the public generally engages with these emergent systems, they know so little about the structures and organization of these systems.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And in fact, over the last two decades, we really have seen people come to trust that the people working behind the scenes in the making of the systems that they are engaging with are making the right choices for them. Right that they have somehow figured out how to create the best 20 results that you could ever want out of millions of potential websites to display to you on the first page of a search result.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And part of the reason, of course, we know that. They trust. That is because oftentimes the things they find are aligned enough with what they're looking for. So if they're looking for something banal and meaningless, like. Is Starbucks open yet? Search results are likely going to give them the right answer. But of course, once we start to look at more sophisticated questions about society or knowledge that has many vantage points, many global vantage points, then we start to see where those results might in fact be incredibly subjective, have a very clear point of view, prioritize or privilege certain worldviews, let's say, over others.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And so this is one of the reasons that I find studying and looking at those kinds of banal, everyday spaces that the public is engaging with rather than what, let's say, experts or academics are contending with. And then kind of knowledge spheres we work in. I find those to be so important because these are the technologies that are reshaping the world, that are remaking the world, and that are what's available for the general public.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So let me take you through some of the things that I have been thinking about since the writing of that book Algorithms of oppression, things that I'm working on now that I think could have a contribution to our field and the way that we take on our serious commitments to things like diversity, equity and inclusion. And for me, those things start with some hard truths.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So I'm going to start with some kind of hard truths, and then I hope that that will give us some space. And I'm going to leave a little bit of time at the end of my remarks for you to drop questions. And of course, you can use the chat to have a conversation. I can't see it right now. I don't have my glasses on. So it's like super fine print. So you can have fun in the chat.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: While I'm having this conversation, first I want to point you to Shonda Prescott Weinstein's work. She has this incredible on medium, a decolonizing science reading list. And I just want to outfront, just acknowledge her and her work because I think it has been so important and transformative in opening up and furthering conversations about what does it mean to decolonise science.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And for me, I think about decolonizing standards or scientific standards or other kinds of information standards, because that feels like not only in my wheelhouse, but such an important set of logics upon which so many forms of knowledge rest. One of the things that I think is important to think about is that we are working in a field that has.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Not made its political commitments entirely clear at all times. So what do I mean by that? Well, first of all, we have these ideas about access to information and knowledge, and yet we have these institutions and efforts and histories that have been about opening up access to scientific information and to knowledge for some people, some very specific groups of people, some very specific nation states at the expense of and in the direct effort to preclude access to that information and that knowledge from others.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So what am I talking about when I say that I'm working on a book right now that I hope will be kind of an alternative history to the internet that we can read alongside the histories that we hold up and Revere in the United states, in particular, as these kind of great men of science, typically great white men of Science Standards and models and people that.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Somehow keeps us from seeing other people and ideas that were also kind of in the milieu over time. All right. One of the things we know, for example, and thank OU library school for this, we know that there are these kind of early antecedents to things like the internet that were incredibly important. And here I'm thinking about people like vannevar Bush and his early memex machine in 1945.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Some of you are going to know what I'm talking about. If you don't, then then you'll know. Before too long these projects of kind of early scientific librarians and information scientists were partially borne out of kind of the first two world wars. So you have, of course, during World War two in particular, major advances in science that lead to weapons and military advances that.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Threaten the planet, quite frankly, that are unbelievable. Right we know about the Manhattan projects. We know about Oppenheimer. There's a new movie out about making the h-bomb and then leaving the because it's a scientific inquiry that has to be pursued and leaving the politics and decisions about that to politicians and to me, this is so fascinating and interesting when we think about the world that we're living in right now, because so much of that early information science organization was about ensuring that scientists, for example, in what was then called the third world or among non-aligned movements, these are the nations of color around the world, all throughout Africa, colonized countries in South America, in the Caribbean, on the continent of Africa, in the Polynesian islands, places where in Asia.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Places where colonial powers were. Committed to ensuring that scientific knowledge around what could be advanced militarily would not fall into the hands of those scientists. And so this is, to me, incredibly, a really incredible and important moment. From which organizations like the National Science Foundation and enphase come into existence in the 1950s, which is so important because it's this kind of Cold War moment where the United States in particular and its allies are.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Are concerned about how scientific knowledge is moved around, who has access to it, and of course, making sure that certain peoples who are considered enemies of the United States do not have access to it. Now, what does that have to do with today? I think it's really interesting and it's important because we are living in a moment where we are dealing still with the effects of colonisation, of occupation, of Indigenous Peoples' lands.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And we as a field have struggled to kind of name our place and figure out our way to contribute to reimagining a more fair and a more just world. So for me, this is so fascinating and exciting to talk about with hundreds of my nerd friends. Probably not exciting to many more people outside of us, and maybe not even exciting to you.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: But I find this to be at the heart of what it means when we are talking about things like diversity, equity and inclusion, because those notions are kind of come out of a post-civil rights moment in the United states, which is also connected to these liberation movements around the world that are trying to reject colonization, that are trying to reject occupation, that are trying to reclaim control over their natural resources, that are trying to assert independence and liberation, and to have a fair and full footing with more powerful nation states, governments and peoples around the world.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And of course, my own personal legacy comes from my parents, who were part of the Civil rights movement. Who allied their own thinking and their own commitments in the United States to these broader sets of pan-africanist concerns or concerns about what it might be like to live in a world where people do not live under oppression in the United states, of course, at the moment, where in the 1950s and 1960s, where the scientific communities are responding to the Soviet union, putting spacecraft into the stratosphere, is that the right layer?
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Don't hold me to stratosphere. We have these kinds of incredible experiences, of unrest, of dissatisfaction, where the American public is saying, we want to live in a world where everyone has equal rights, civil rights, where women have equal rights, where women of color and Black women also have the right to vote. And and I think so much about what what it might have been like for us to interrogate our role as a community, as a scientific community, as a standards community, kind of in the view of the times that have really brought us to this moment.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So these are some of the things that I'm thinking about. These are some of the provocations that I want to kind of just like, you know. Fire some synapses with me on these ideas. Because what that does is it gives us. A completely different way of thinking about what our projects are in the world. And what we're truly working on. So take with me this journey of thinking about the moment that we live in now.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: We live in a moment where we have unprecedented global inequality, wealth and economic inequality since we have been keeping records of inequality. Every year, we outpace the year before in global economic inequality. We are living in a moment where scientific knowledge about how to solve that kind of problem is so incredibly important that we measure and understand things like quality of life around the world, along shared understandings of what a high quality of life means.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I know that for some people, a high quality of life is not getting to upgrade to the next version of an iPhone. And for some, it is. So we have to kind of contend with what does it mean to live on a planet that we share, where we are interconnected, we are interdependent, and our interests around the world have to be thought about in terms of quality of life and standards for quality of life.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And I think we play a role in. Contributing to those conversations. We are also living in a time where we have new conceptions of things like climate change. Now, I've already told you how old I am, so I don't have to pretend or play any games anymore. Despite all the hair dye, I remember the time when the way we talked about things like the environment or environmental catastrophe was we spoke in terms of things like increasing pollution or holes in the ozone layer.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And what we have learned from climate scientists, when you hear them speak now, their vocabularies about climate change, the places they go and study and think about the climate have completely changed. And part of the reason that is change has been by the demand that communities that have been overlooked by scientific interventions be included.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So now we have ways of thinking about climate change, where we center people, for example, who live in Polynesian islands that are in decline, that are going away because they are being flooded completely. We are centering people who are losing their places where they have lived for generations to. Fires to land that cannot grow food any longer to.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Changes that render the water either not potable or inaccessible. Places that were once pristine. Lush amazing places for people to live and make community for thousands of years no longer available to human beings. So this has really changed the way we think about. The use of science in prioritizing people who are most vulnerable to climate change.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: For me, this is, again, like a powerful example of what it means to decolonize climate science by prioritizing and putting those who would be most harmed or most affected at the center. So this is an example of that is underway for us to look at and to learn from. We also have issues and concerns about things like educational equity and access. I know, for example, where I live here in Los Angeles and Los Angeles Unified school district, when the pandemic hit of COVID 19, we had some 40,000 students who never once logged in and were able to continue to advance their education.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And so we have all these kind of complications around the models of delivery that we have developed that no longer make sense as we live in a changing world that will increasingly be vulnerable to things like viruses that affect millions of people around the world. So we have to think about what does it mean to make educational equity real? How do we make knowledge more available?
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I know that your students, for those of you who work with students, I know your students, like my students, don't just write their papers from the internet and Google searches. I know that's not happening. Definitely not happening. But for those who are using things like commercial search engines like Google or other search services to answer questions and to seek and find information, it's so incredibly important that we think about what does it mean that.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So much scientific research and knowledge production across the humanities, across the social sciences, the arts lives many times behind paywalls that only scholars and students and universities have access to. So we have a role to play in thinking about the changing nature of these systems that our own children are going through, that our neighbors children's are going through, that are in many ways being defunded, devalued and are in some places in cases, crumbling or unavailable.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And what is our role as information professionals, information scientists in remaking and opening up access to knowledge? One of the things that I thought was so interesting and of course, I study and watch what happens in search engines is that the most searched for information in a Google Search and Google searches is health related information. Now, this is so telling and so important for us to watch and to think about, because even for those of us who live in the United states, I know our friends in Canada and Europe don't understand how we're living.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So just bear with me as you hear me talk about this, because I know it's horrible to hear for those of you who have, you know, nationalized health care, we do not have that in the United States. And so you have and you see that the most searched for terms are terms about health and health care. And this, to me is so telling about what it means when people do not have access to health care services, that they go on WebMD and try to diagnose themselves and try to figure out.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And, of course, we know this is tied to the kind of billion wellness industry that is also fraught with lots of non scientific snake oil. Dangerous ideas about how to protect oneself includes. Including like. Like medicine. They get horses. I'm just going to leave it. OK so these are the kinds of opportunities that I think are before us.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Now, let me say a little bit about standardizing people, because this is kind of the world we are now, and we have spent hundreds of years as scientists organizing. As many things on Earth as we can. And in space that we have access to. Organizing them into elaborate scientific regimes about the world.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Ordering the world. And of course, this is. A very political as well set of processes that we know that also M&A from these earlier times that I've talked about under colonization, the elaborate kind of taxonomies of species on the planet, much of which was also used in service of. On organizing people into racist hierarchies.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: We know that this whether it's cranium, cranial measurement, measuring melanin in one's skin, in the skin of peoples, looking at kind of the width of one's face, all of these things, brain size, trying to use those kinds of eugenicist scientific markers to determine and declare who is the superior class of human being.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: All of those kinds of things are also part of these history histories of standardized information's, standardized science. And again, these are to me, the most interesting places to look, because they have kind of overdetermined in many ways, the world that we're living in now. They've they've shaped and created the environment and the world that we inhabit now. And we are doing so much work to refute, dislodge, speak back to disprove these kinds of racist and sexist and heteronormative ideas about the standards by which we measure people.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: We are we are also in this moment where we are contending with not only the standardization, but the making of models that are used to organize human beings and determine their worthiness or lack of worthiness in terms of access to all kinds of services and all kinds of systems. So, for example, we have models that are used to recognize our faces.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Facial recognition models. We have models that are used to determine our credit worthiness. We have models that are used to determine whether we will be successful in college or whether we should be admitted to college. We have models that are used to determine whether we should get a mortgage or a loan. And many of these models are increasingly moving from, let's say, algorithmic formulations based on kind of course, we know long histories of flawed data sets, data sets that have precluded people and that are flattening the richness of our lived experiences.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: But we are now moving into an era where. Machine learning algorithms. Machine learning is taking in and ingesting so much data that it is in fact sorting us in all kinds of different ways that we maybe will not even be able to intervene upon or make sense of. And of course, this is we look at some of these projects that have been recently unleashed and everyone here is talking about GPT and openai, but it's really so imperative that we think about kind of the underlying logics of social organization, of standardization that is happening, that will classify people in or out of different kinds of opportunities.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And for me, this is actually the place of my life's work. I mean, I feel that these are some of the most rich and interesting questions that are taking place at a time when we do not have. Other systematic. Protections or laws or customs or practices to help us contend with corral governance make sense of the consequences of so many of these new projects.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And so this is a place where I also think that our field has so much to offer. We really we should be at the forefront of not just kind of passively letting our work in service of all kinds of colonial projects of the past that we may not have even knew we were working in service of. And I, I tell my students often at UCLA that kind of once we know we have a responsibility to kind of work with the knowledge that we are introduced to and to kind of contend with it and grapple with it.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: It doesn't mean that I have a prescriptive answer. I think what we are engaged in together is a process of figuring out what has come before us, what have we inherited, what are we contributing to, how might we remake some of the assumptions upon which we do our work? How might we reimagine business models? For example, are there business models upon which publishers and other kinds of libraries, and other kinds of institutions can make knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, accessible to the world, while also making space for new epistemology, new ways of thinking, ways of kind of both critiquing what's happened, but being more expansive about the kinds of future that we want.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: These are not unconscious actions. These are actually opportunities that we can embrace. And so for me, these are the kinds of things that I think about as I think about what does it mean to decolonize our field? What does it mean to decolonize standards? It means that we kind of question the assumptions upon which the scientific world is organized. We reimagine new possibilities.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And of course, nowhere is there more of a sensibility that science evolves, that people evolve, that we discover and are introduced to new things. We observe new things, and we incorporate those. And so we don't have to be static. We don't have a static field. We don't have a static orientation to the world that we live in.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I guess the last thing that I want to say is that we are living in this kind of moment where there's so much consolidation of power, who gets to organize knowledge and information, who controls knowledge and information and. These are difficult questions that we're grappling with. I mean, in Europe and the EU, we see more regulation and more concern than we've seen in the United States.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So far about what does it mean for US companies to control knowledge and information regimes in other parts of the world? In particular, Europe has been concerned with this. We have narratives about the continent of Africa. We have narratives about South America that are narrow and that don't properly account for the voices and the concerns coming from an emanating from these parts of the world.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So I find it to be such an incredible moment to be alive in our field and doing this work, because we have an opportunity to be incredibly expansive about how we think about things like diversity, equity, inclusion and access. We could actually re-imagine these words in a way that centers the concerns of people who have both been victims of past practices, but also who have incredible ideas about how to find a way forward into a more fairer and a more just world.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: At the end of the day, I think that. I'm nowhere near a lifetime of achievement. I feel like I'm just starting to have. The kinds of conversations that are important to me. And we're just barely scratching the surface. I mean, so many technologies and systems are changing. Just as we start to understand them, they evolve.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: New insurance, new players come into the marketplace. Different voices get to emerge and move forward and take the microphone for a minute. And so I'm very grateful that you have given me this time this bit of microphone sharing to talk about some truly some provocations that we have for our field. And I embrace this award because I think that, you know, for you to give it to me, knowing the things that I write about and the things that I work on, to me signals that there's a great opportunity to kind of.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Bring hard conversations into the foreground to. Rethink how we organize and disseminate and share knowledge and information around the world. How to put science and information and knowledge in service of the most pressing issues that there are. It's so humbling, I have to say, to just be able to share some of these ideas with you.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I hope that I have not broken the meeting and that you're still here with me and that you will not regret having given me this award. So thank you very much. I think I'll leave it there. And I'm happy to entertain a conversation or questions with you. That was fantastic.
TODD CARPENTER: First of all, thank you so much for your ideas. And you have absolutely not broken the meeting. You have reinforced many of the things that we are trying to do and to say organizationally and not only with this conference. So thank you. It is such an honor. And as someone who is age, age adjacent, right. You know, Lifetime Achievement doesn't necessarily mean that you won't continue to do more.
TODD CARPENTER: And we are looking forward to everything that you will continue to do. Want to encourage people. If you have any questions for Dr. noble, please put them in the Q&A. The chat is zooming by pretty quickly. I won't ever be able to capture them. They're there. I do have my glasses on.
TODD CARPENTER: It's not that tiny for me, but it is. It is pretty moving pretty quickly. I thought it was fantastic. The way you framed. The consolidated, the power of organization and the practices that have gone on for hundreds of years in terms of taxonomy development. Putting things into boxes was some of the things that Dr. Weinberger talked about yesterday.
TODD CARPENTER: Are there ways in which we can use technology the way we can use our power as an ISO to help. Create spaces for those different vocabularies and spaces in which they can communicate with each other so that, you know, you don't have to use the standard Western European taxonomy for, you know. How books are classified, that there are ways in which we can.
TODD CARPENTER: How do you think we can best maintain that diversity of our world? And is there a way in which we can help move that forward?
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I mean, it's such a great question. I remember once talking to a group of librarians and they asked me, you know, do we just throw out the. You know, the catalog guys organized and start over. And I said, you know, and I was thinking about.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: You know, the way in which. You know, our colleagues have challenged us to kind of clear the catalog and think about what does it mean to I'm blanking, I want to grab this book and give you the name of it. So I'm just trying to think of it while we're talking. That's about kind of wearing the catalog and wearing the library, but it's like we can keep these legacy systems, I think, in intact.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And of course, we know we are always building and evolving systems that also or taxonomies that challenge them. So that we have many vantage points. I mean, one of the things that I think is so and I try to talk about this in my work is like we need many vantage points into knowledge and we need to also be able to see what is in dialogue, who are we in dialogue with?
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Right so we don't actually have to be completely oppositional, although sometimes we will. We don't. But we could think of like what would the anti-racist catalog look like? How would it help us make sense of the history of knowledge that we have so that we can have the right iframes on what we're looking at? When I was in library school, Dr. Lee Estabrook was one of my professors.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Some of her. And I remember she introduced us to the. I just have like. Like brain fog, like crazy right now. Atlas to the Atlas. And many of you might know that this was at one time considered the most important medical textbook that had the most intricate drawings of the human body kind of under the skin.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And it was used. It was kind of out of World War two. It was used widely in medical schools and kind of the most beautiful illustrated drawings you'd ever seen of the human body. Well, we then learned, of course, that the atlas, as a horrific project of the Nazi government was had used the cadavers of Jewish people who had been murdered by Nazis.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And so this. The question is posed to the young library science student how do we catalog? This what is this artifact, this atlas? And, you know, I think we resolved that it could both be a medical text. It could also be cataloged under. You know, the Holocaust.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: It could also be cataloged as under human rights violations. It could have many ways that we could iframe that artifact that help us make sense of what it truly is, so that as we uncover it in the medical library, we don't just relate to it as a medical textbook with like devoid of the atrocious of what it actually is to. And I think those kinds of things are very, very valuable for us because for me and in my own human value system, I think that we are losing more and more of our human ANSI through these kinds of systems that really flatten what we're engaging with.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: It flattens knowledge, it flattens artifacts, the digital flattens things that were formerly complex and rich. And that seems like a horrible place that we might evolve to, is to lose the richness of our humanity. What we would need is for knowledge and our knowledge systems to help us reclaim our humanity. So that we, in fact, don't have things like the Holocaust occur. Definitely since it wouldn't be a technology meeting if I didn't ask you, you've already raised this.
TODD CARPENTER: We won't mention the any particular a.I., but I'd be interested to hear from your perspective. What's going. Search and discovery and a lot of human experience online is so much more intermediated by machines. And I expect with natural language processing and AI being incorporated into Bing and Google and other services, I'd be interested to hear your perspective on the idea that not only will the ais.
TODD CARPENTER: Incorporate, presume to know what you're looking for. And then presume to know what best matches what you're looking for. But we'll then take that a step further, analyze it, and present to you a summary that, you know, here's a natural language summary of the actual content that you wanted, whether it's accurate or not. Kind of where do you how can we help to shape that environment where we're going to be reliant on these machines that are problematic in several different.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Directions Yeah. Well, there's a couple of things happening here. First, I think we are going to have to contend with the way in which. Our engagement with these kinds of technologies are changing our brain. And anyone who is teaching students right now knows that.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Students, for example, have a very hard time reading a whole book. It's very hard for many students, not all students, but a lot of students struggle because they're used to scrolling, reading very, very short summaries. And so that's a skill set that we're going to have to contend with. Are we are we losing something, which I think is I told you the dog she eventually was going to pop off.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And then there's kind of these questions about. So the demand. Do people just want, like, give me the. Give me the point of everything. And certainly there is a profound socialization underway in countries and places where people use these kinds of technologies. And I think there's a lot to unpack there that we could spend time with.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So one of the things we see in our field is that we are often under pressure to adapt to what the major dominant market leaders are. Let me say major market advertisers. Let me be really clear what their interests are. And so you see libraries, for example, wanting to make interfaces to the catalog look like a Google search box. Right or other types of search boxes.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I mean, this is like old I mean, 20 years old. But that that pressure came and we responded. The field responded. So I think we have some of those kinds of challenges. But I think if we look ahead, we'll also see there's something interesting happening with Joneses right now who are not actually interested in search results. Now, you know, is this my fault?
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I don't know. But but they just trust, you know, they they're kind of like, oh, maybe we're not sure if this ranking is right. They're a little more aware than previous generations that something's something's going on. And they also know from their own experience of working with things like social media, they know what shadow banning is or they believe that that's a thing.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: They certainly understand like algorithmic amplification or suppression. I think that's a better way to put it, like getting a boost or not getting boosted. So they understand kind of these politics of how these systems work. A lot of people are very much more aware. And so I've been finding it. So fascinating to see younger people going to places like tiktok or Instagram Reels to hear what other people have to say about a thing.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Trusting what other people say and what their experiences are more than they are going to trust, let's say, a website. So this is very interesting to study. I mean, we have a lot of things that we should be watching and that has to do with. Then to what degree will the semantic web be able to kind of make sense of all of this content that's moving all of this user generated content that's everywhere, and then summarize it and feed it back to us or adapt will search adapt to these new ways of information sharing?
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I think it will have to I'm sure I have it on some decent information that this is a big stressor for Google is the kind of way in which the Semantic Web is maybe not exactly how I don't know that people really expected younger people to start engaging or leaving search behind, let's say ignoring search to some degree. So these things are like fascinating, important questions for the scholars, but also for practitioners to be thinking about.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And I think now also has a role to play in being on the cutting edge, especially when it comes to technologies who are trying to think about interoperability of systems and like containing and corralling what we know as human beings, and then figuring out what to save, what will get saved and what will be prioritized. You know, I didn't mention so much in my provocation, but I will say we're going to have to think about and contend with.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: What does it mean that we're saving everything, you know, that all the data is being saved and that it's getting harder and harder to disambiguate what's important from what's not important? And that curatorial function that we have played as a field feels like it needs a refresh and need some action around thinking. Thinking through that too. Yeah, several questions come in from the participants.
TODD CARPENTER: Thank you for that question here for you. Are there any technologies being implemented in information organization that are kind of reimagining access from a lens that you're aware of? Any technologies being implemented. I mean, I'm sure there are. And, you know, I will probably the most experimental thing that I have come across just and this again, I can't speak for everything that's happening out here because I have no idea, honestly.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: But I have seen there's an organization in California called feminist AI, and it has been very interesting for the last couple of years to watch them take things like my work and try to imagine what it would mean to have things like a feminist search or to have slow search, right? Or to kind of like really like they really are inverting so many ideas around something like search, deconstructing and and then building up new kinds of technologies.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So it's been interesting to watch them. I would look them up feminist. I, they definitely, I think are centering in their work for sure and all the way from like, you know, architectural conceptualizations of how we do search. Flexibility modularity you know again less standardizing to one particular model, dominant model, but thinking in much more kind of fluid ways.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And I've been to some of their events where they've done this kind of bending of my work and it's mind blowing. So I think that's interesting. The one thing I the book I was trying to remember earlier when I was saying querying our way of thinking is Melissa Adler, who you might some of you might know Melissa Adler's querying the catalog where theory and the politics of correction.
TODD CARPENTER: And I think that's another instructive book for us. Another question has come in. What are some of the challenges that you face with regard to your efforts to have people of color included and recognized in the programs and processes in your field? Any thoughts in that?
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Well this is a tough one because I think I'm one of like, I don't know, like 20 or less black PhDs in library and information science.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: At least like last time I counted, I was trying to account with a couple of other PhDs in our field. And so as and large, as a field, we are not diverse, at least we certainly do not have a lot of black representation in our field and. And so, you know, the field struggles also, I think, in my experience with these kinds of conversations.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So I have faced a lot of challenges talking about this work professionally in academia, although my work, I will tell you, has been resoundingly supported by librarians and information professionals and technologists. So that's interesting. Between this kind of rub between academic information science and the practice where it's been like no challenge and it's been absolutely wonderful and this award is like evidence of that.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: I'm just like so moving. So I think, you know, without black and Latino, Latino and Asian-American and lgbtqia faculty in information schools around the world, I think we will continue to produce a very narrow kind of set of scholars and who are interested in whatever they're interested in, which may not be what I'm talking about today.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So I think that has to do something with it. I think also that the field has been fairly insular when we're talking about things like decolonization or equity or civil rights or justice. We should be interfacing with the fields in ethnic studies and gender studies where the most prolific scholars in the world are working out of those kinds of fields. Right sociology, history, Africana Studies.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So that means we should be doing much more engagement, more interdisciplinarity. I mean, I now at this stage of my career, my faculty appointment is in gender studies, in African-American studies because I'm post tenure and I can do that. And I want to be located in the heart of conversations intellectually with my peers who are talking about these things and researching and writing and are on the cutting edge of thinking about these things, because those people have not been in my traditional field of Information Studies or information science.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: So we have work to do in certainly in the academic organizations. And we I think we again, if you think back to like the provocations, how could we even go about doing this work without the knowledge that lives? In other areas of expertise. And I think this is one of the reasons why we're kind of flagging as a field around these issues.
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah so certainly a lot of work left to do. And I hope in, in tiny measure some of the things that meso does with regards to our Dia issues or DEIA activities are trying to help move the community forward in our own way or we're trying. Can I say just something to that, please? I mean, I think these declarations by so about a commitment to are extremely powerful.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: And other organizations are watching when we do or don't acknowledge the incredible power of our field in transforming the world. Right so we do. You know, I think if we did anything around. These values, it would be making them more and more visible. And so that nice I was doing that is very important. We should not underestimate.
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: What not doing that does and says right. It says a lot, especially in the day and age that we're living in, where there's profound violence and war and, you know, police brutality and all of the things that we witness, we have a role to play. And I think, you know, I mean, standards about AI are being decided. Where are we in the room? Are we having the conversation?
DR. SAFIYA NOBLE: Are we bringing the knowledge to bear that we know about discriminatory technical systems? We know. So we should be in these spaces, in places advocating. And that is an expression of our commitment to as well as hiring people and centering people of color who often are pushed to the margin.
TODD CARPENTER: I cannot think of a better way to end this conversation. Dr. noble, thank you so much. Congratulations again. This has been a fantastic a fantastic hour. Really appreciate all of your contributions to our field and our community. And like I said, this is a waypoint. I hope you continue along this very important work and advance our community in the ways that you have.
TODD CARPENTER: Thank you so much. Thank you, all of you. I really appreciate you. And I am honored. Great thank you. That brings our award ceremony to a close end of our miles Conrad lecture. Thank you all. And we will continue the program later this afternoon.
TODD CARPENTER: Thank you.
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