Each spring, my University is has a Campus Reading Celebration where they choose a boo, make it available to the campus community, and host a visit by the author. This spring’s book, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble, is suprisingly timely and should be of interest to mathematics students.

Last spring, I acquired a hardopy of the book before knowing about our school’s plans, and it site here waiting for me to read over the holiday. This post will be a running collection of notes and thoughts on the book along with linked resources to help others understand the topics covered. As I gather material, this post will be revised. Ultimately, this post will become a set of questions to guide reading along with links to supporting material I find online. I’ll use those questions to help my students read the text1 and participate in campus conversations in April.

Check back often if you want to see this post evolve. Check back in late January if you want to see the final product.

The #Metagame bookclub featured this book in June 2019, and it has some interesting resources:

The Women’s Center for Creative Work had a book club on this wook in Spring 2019.

https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1031&context=theliminal

https://www.feminist.ai/aoo-book-club

  1. Electronic copies of the text will be available for free download, and some hardcopies will be vailable, too, for those who need that format. ↩