Nicole Coleman - Are You Worried About Data Bias? Invest in Libraries

With our most powerful optimizing engines today fueled on information from the past, it is more important than ever to know the provenance of that information and to understand its context. To keep pace with the needs of this information hungry age, we need to take care to maintain a thriving ecosystem of data management so that we don’t find ourselves drowning in a swamp of undifferentiated data. Libraries are not merely repositories, they are complex organizations that, in helping us manage information, knowledge, and cultural heritage, also help us manage bias.

This talk is presented as a part of the Comm230X +1 Speaker Series, and is open to both Stanford students and the general public.

Speaker Bio

Nicole is Digital Research Architect for the Stanford University Libraries and Research Director for Humanities+Design, a research lab at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. Nicole works at the intersection of the digital library and digital scholarship as a lead architect in the design and development of practical research services. She is currently leading an initiative within the Library to identify and enact applications of artificial intelligence —machine perception, machine learning, machine reasoning, and language recognition— to make the collections of maps, photographs, manuscripts, data sets and other assets more easily discoverable, accessible, and analyzable.

At Humanities + Design she has led the design and development of numerous tools for data visualization and analysis including Palladio, Breve, and, most recently, Data Pen. The lab encourages and supports collaboration between researchers from the humanities and design to encode interpretive method in tools for data analysis. Lessons learned in that work have proven essential to designing human-centered applications of machine intelligence in support of research.