LMU Library Staff Picks

Assuming no knowledge of linguistics, Understanding Digital Literacies provides an accessible and timely introduction to new media literacies. It supplies readers with the theoretical and analytical tools with which to explore the linguistic and social impact of a host of new digital literacy practices.

Digital literacy is a powerful subject, which supports inclusivity, social mobility and digital citizenship globally. This book brings together thought-leaders and experts in the field, providing a blend of research and practice across sectors, and provides a valuable and timely insight into digital literacy and learning. The book will be useful reading for library and information professionals across the sector, institutional leaders and managers, and LIS students. It will also be useful reading for educational technologists, learning and teaching professionals.

This book explains how and why information literacy can help to foster critical thinking and discerning attitudes, enabling citizens to play an informed role in society and its democratic processes

Crayons and iPads examines the use of digital technology in the early stages of child development and the way in which learning techniques have evolved in classrooms across the world. Taking the position that tablets provide an accessible learning and instructional tool, Debra Harwood explores how tablets can be used to provoke, ignite, and excite children’s interest in the world around them, arguing that it is through this engagement with technology that new discoveries are made and learning takes place.

In Digital Citizenship in Action, you'll find practical ways for taking digital citizenship lessons beyond a conversation about personal responsibility so that you can create opportunities for students to become participatory citizens, actively engaging in multiple levels of community and developing relationships based on mutual trust and understanding with others in these spaces.

This book considers the radical effects the emergence of social media and digital politics have had on the way that advocacy organisations mobilise and organise citizens into political participation. It argues that these changes are due not only to technological advancement but are also underpinned by hybrid media systems, new political narratives, and a new networked generation of political actors.

Bringing together top scholars to discuss how digital equity in education might become a key goal in American education, this book is structured to provide a framework for understanding how historically underrepresented students most effectively engage with technology--and how institutions may help or hinder students' ability to develop and capitalize on digital literacies. This book will appeal to readers who are well versed in the diverse uses of social media and technologies, as well as less technologically savvy educators and policy analysts in educational organizations. Addressing the intersection of digital media, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic class in a frank manner, the lessons within this compelling work will help educators enable students to participate in a rapidly changing world framed by shifting new media technologies.

This book critically reviews existing digital divide research and challenges its core thesis, which posits unequal Internet access as a newly formed source of social disadvantage. The book concludes with a consideration of the implications that this new perspective has for the information society theory and policies as well as for the role of social science in the informatization process.

This volume summarizes the evolution of news and information in the United States as it has been shaped by technology. It points out the effects of different types of news and information -- from investigative journalism to disinformation spread via social media -- giving readers examples of the potential influence information might have on culture. Provides data about the current news and information landscape that captures elements of consumer engagement with a variety of news sources, providing readers with a broader understanding of how news and information is consumed and resonates with U.S. citizens

In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.

A powerful investigative look at data-based discrimination--and how technology affects civil and human rights and economic equity. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values.

What's wrong with targeted advertising in political campaigns? Should we be worried about echo chambers? How does data collection impact on trust in society? As decision-making becomes increasingly automated, how can decision-makers be held to account? This collection consider potential solutions to these challenges. It brings together original research on the philosophy of big data and democracy from leading international authors, with recent examples - including the 2016 Brexit Referendum, the Leveson Inquiry and the Edward Snowden leaks. And it asks whether an ethical compass is available or even feasible in an ever more digitised and monitored world.

Every day, corporations are connecting the dots about our personal behavior--silently scrutinizing clues left behind by our work habits and Internet use. But who connects the dots about what firms are doing with all this information? Frank Pasquale exposes how powerful interests abuse secrecy for profit and explains ways to rein them in.

From the 1960s to present, the book examines how computing technology has been used to neutralize the threat that black people pose to the existing racial order, but also how blackpeople seized these new computing tools to build community, wealth, and wage a war for racial justice.Through archival sources and the voices of many of those who lived and made this history, Black Software centralizes African Americans' role in the Internet's creation and evolution, illuminating both the limits and possibilities for using digital technology to push for racial justice in the UnitedStates and across the globe.

Social media penetrate our lives: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and many other platforms define daily habits of communication and creative production. This book studies the rise of social media, providing both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of major platforms in the context of a rapidly changing ecosystem of connective media. Author José van Dijck offers an analytical prism that can be used to view techno-cultural as well as socio-economic aspects of this transformation as well as to examine shared ideological principles between major social media platforms.

In this provocative book, Siva Vaidhyanathan examines the ways we have used and embraced Google--and the growing resistance to its expansion across the globe. He exposes the dark side of our Google fantasies, raising red flags about issues of intellectual property and the much-touted Google Book Search. He assesses Google's global impact, particularly in China, and explains the insidious effect of Googlization on the way we think. Finally, Vaidhyanathan proposes the construction of an Internet ecosystem designed to benefit the whole world and keep one brilliant and powerful company from falling into the "evil" it pledged to avoid.

The rise of Google and its integration into nearly every aspect of our lives has pushed libraries to adopt similar "Google-like" search tools, called discovery systems. Because these tools are provided by libraries and search scholarly materials rather than the open web, we often assume they are more "accurate" or "reliable" than their general-purpose peers like Google or Bing. Library discovery systems struggle with accuracy, relevance, and human biases, and these shortcomings have the potential to shape the academic research and worldviews of the students and faculty who rely on them.

Are algorithms friend or foe? The human mind is evolutionarily designed to take shortcuts in order to survive. However, inherent bias negatively affects work environments and the decision-making surrounding our communities. While the creation of algorithms and machine learning attempts to eliminate bias, they are, after all, created by human beings, and thus are susceptible to what we call algorithmic bias. In Understand, Manage, and Prevent Algorithmic Bias, author Tobias Baer helps you understand where algorithmic bias comes from, how to manage it as a business user or regulator, and how data science can prevent bias from entering statistical algorithms.

Machine learning is one of the fastest growing areas of computer science, with far-reaching applications. The aim of this textbook is to introduce machine learning, and the algorithmic paradigms it offers, in a principled way. The book provides a theoretical account of the fundamentals underlying machine learning and the mathematical derivations that transform these principles into practical algorithms.

In her book “Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy,” Cathy O'Neil shows how businesses, governments and other organizations have recently come to depend on mathematical models to inform their choices, and she illustrates the consequent dangers to which we are vulnerable.