Blog Posts

NSF Grant funded

8/16/2020

I'm excited to share the news that I have received a $299,997 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for an interdisciplinary project that I am a co-PI on: “Using Problem-Based Learning to Increase the Ethical Reasoning Skills of Electrical and Computer Engineering Students”

The grant will kick off a three-year study that explores how engineering students’ perceptions of social responsibility (used in this work to describe the obligation that professional engineers have to act with the welfare and interests of society at large) changes after participation in this ethics focused course, the persistence of these changes over time, and compare these perceptions against engineering students from other disciplines without the freshman ethics focus.

We'll be integrating critical information and data perspectives in the training of engineering students to leverage inter-disciplinary skillsets that are often siloed outside of STEM and not represented in engineering ethics training.

Faculty investigators are Todd Freeborn (PI, Engineering), Claire Major (co-PI, Education), and myself (co-PI, Library and Information Sciences).

Joining the C2i2's Scholar's Council

8/16/2020

The Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), led by Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble and Dr. Sarah T. Roberts, announced the exciting news that they have received a $2.9M Award to launch the multi-year Minderoo Initiative on Technology and Power initiative:

“This initiative will critically investigate the social impact of digital technologies on communities and the broader public good. It will create new paradigms for the public to understand the harms of tech platforms, predictive technologies, advertising-driven algorithmic content, and the work of digital laborers.”

Congratulations to C2i2 for receiving this award; I'm so excited to be joining C2i2 as a part of their Scholar's Council, which comprises a team of "scholars, artists, activists, and leader who share a commitment to standing up to unjust technologies and systems."

I'm looking forward to working with this amazing group of people to support the development of a better future. Stay tuned!

Happy World Emoji Day!

7/17/2020

Happy World Emoji Day! (Yes, it's a real thing!)

Time to celebrate your favorite emoji and reflect on the technologies that we use, but often take for-granted, every day. I reflect on emoji in my research, asking the question, "What do emojis have to do with race?" Turns out, quite a bit!

As a part of World Emoji Day, my research on whiteness and emoji skin-tone modifiers was featured in an interview with NPR's Janae Pierre from WBHM, and in this news write up from the University of Alabama.

If you are interested in learning more about the research behind these interviews, you can read about the study I conducted in 2019 with my co-author Kelsea Whaley called Technically white: Emoji skin-tone modifiers as American technoculture.

Interview with Radical AI podcast

6/17/2020

I had the absolute pleasure of talking with Jess and Dylan, the hosts of the Radical AI podcast, about the ethics of chatbots, virtual assistants, and emoji design. They were really gracious and fun to talk with, and I can't say enough good things about the quality of their podcast. I highly recommend subscribing to the Radical AI podcast and soaking up all of the wisdom from their conversations with leading scholars in technology and media studies. (A great podcast to use in class and assign for students as well!)

Subscribe or listen to the episode here!

What is socially responsible AI? Broad Science podcast ep available

4/9/2020

I was interviewed by the amazing folks at Broad Science for their podcast several months ago. Broad Science is "an initiative dedicated to making science inclusive, engaging, and intersectional," and focuses on "telling science stories from the voices and perspectives that often get overlooked and go untold." I love what they are all about, and recommend checking out their full list of podcast eps on soundcloud.

This episode entitled "What is socially responsible AI?" (aired April 3rd, 2020) features interviews with myself, Dr. Timnit Gebru, Surya Matu, and Dr. Kirk Bansak. The interviewers cover a ton of ground in this episode, including racial profiling, machine bias, interface design, and issues of diversity and inclusion in STEM. We discussed issues of gender and labor in virtual assistant design including the impacts of these technologies in society and broader questions about AI ethics. All of these interviews are fabulous; I start around 42:00, but definitely take the time to listen to the whole thing!

Thank you to Broad Science for reaching out to me, and wonderful job on this episode!

Available at Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/broad-science/what-is-socially-responsible-ai

Book Review of The Emoji Revolution for NM&S out now

2/14/2020

I was very pleased to review The emoji revolution: How technology is shaping the future of communication by Philip Seargeant (2019) for New Media & Society. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn a lot more about emoji and histories of language and communication.

An excerpt from the review:

Philip Seargeant is an applied linguist who specializes in language, social media, and online interaction. In The Emoji Revolution, Seargeant presents a wide-ranging sociolinguistic account of the historical, social, and political use contexts of emoji, arguing that emoji act “as a prism through which to view the history of human communication” (p. 5). Moreover, Seargeant identifies emoji as “a perfect cipher” (p. 190) for understanding the paradoxes of creativity and control that result from the rampant technological changes that underpin computer-mediated communication. He argues that the same innovations that make emoji a compelling global communication form—standardization, interpretive flexibility, interoperability—raise important questions about the role of consumerism and corporate power in shaping emergent computer-mediated communication practices. In this way, Seargeant identifies emoji not only as a cipher, but also as a harbinger for the future of human (and computer) communication.

Picture of book cover of The Emoji Revolution

Read the rest of the review here!

Sweeney, M. E. (2020). The emoji revolution: How technology is shaping the future of communication. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820907080

Keynote, Library Research Seminar VII

10/22/2019

It was my pleasure to give a keynote at the Library Research Seminar VII event last week in Columbia, South Carolina. This event is sponsored by the American Library Association's Library Research Roundtable (LRRT), and was a really generative and generous space to brainstorm about research with LIS students, practitioners, and scholars of all kinds.
A big thank you to all who planned and executed this event, and much gratitude for inviting me to come share ideas with this warm community!

New article out about USCIS's Latina virtual assistant "Emma"

7/25/2019

My collaborator, Dr. Melissa Villa-Nicholas, and I are proud to announce that our new article,
"Designing the "good citizen" through Latina identity in USCIS's virtual assistant "Emma", is now published in the online issue of Feminist Media Studies!

This paper marks the first of three projects interrogating various cultural, political, and social aspects of Latina AI. Stay tuned for updates on this research!

*You can learn more about Dr. Melissa Villa-Nicholas's pioneering research on Latinx information histories and practices here!

Abstract:
Virtual assistants are increasingly integrated as “user-friendly” interfaces for e-government services. This research investigates the case study of the virtual assistant, “Emma,” that is integrated into the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) website. We conduct an interface analysis of Emma, along with the USCIS website, and related promotional materials, to explore the cultural affordances of Latina identity as a strategic design for this virtual assistant. We argue that the Emma interface makes normative claims about citizenship and inclusion in an attempt to “hail” Latinx users as ideal citizens. We find that the “ideal” citizen is defined through the Emma interface as an assimilated citizen-consumer that engages with digital technologies in ways that produce them as informationally “legible” to the state.

Cite as: Melissa Villa-Nicholas & Miriam E. Sweeney (2019) Designing the “good citizen” through Latina identity in USCIS’s virtual assistant “Emma”, Feminist Media Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2019.1644657

New article out on emoji skin-tone modifers

7/3/2019

I'm so excited to announce that I have a new article out with co-author (and UA SLIS alum) Kelsea Whaley, that discusses emoji skin-tone modifers and whiteness. This project was a long time in the making, so it's a delight to finally see it out in final form! Check out the article, "Technically white: Emoji skin-tone modifers as American technoculture," in the July 2019 issue of First Monday!

Abstract:
The inclusion of skin-tone modifiers into the standard emoji set marked a shift from the default white racialization of emoji towards explicit attempts to expand racial representation in the human emoji characters. This study explores the racial logics of emoji as culturally-situated artifacts that rely on linked understandings of race and technology. We conduct an interface analysis of emoji skin-tone modifiers, coupled with user discourse analysis, to explore the design and user interpretations of skin-tone modifiers. Our findings suggest that though the skin-tone modifiers were introduced as an intervention into the lack of racial representation in emoji, they continue to technically center whiteness in the emoji set as an extension of American technoculture.

Cite as: Sweeney, M.E. & Whaley, K. (2019). Technically white: Emoji skin-tone modifiers as American technoculture. First Monday, 24(7), 0-0, http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i7.10060.

Harvard talk on Latina AI

4/20/2019

I had a wonderful time presenting with my research partner Melissa Villa-Nicholas on one of our projects about Latina AI at the Harvard Kennedy School on March 25th. Our talk focused on "Emma", the Latina virtual assistant used by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) as a part of their e-government services. This presentation explores the cultural affordances of Latina identity as a strategic design choice in the Emma interface that extends citizenship and nation-building projects for the state, while masking underlying information and data gathering capabilities.

We were privileged to have Dana Chisnell, co-director of the Center for Civic Design, serve as a moderator for our talk. We felt very welcome, thanks largely to all of the hard work and planning of Vanessa Rhinesmith, the Associate Director of digitalHKS. Thank you to everyone who came and talked with us about the politics and surveillance implications of digital technologies designed to gather information about Latinx communities.

Recording of talk available to watch here.

*Watch for our paper, "Designing the ‘good citizen’ through Latina identity in USCIS’s virtual assistant ‘Emma'", in Feminist Media Studies forthcoming later in 2019.

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