Faculty Books

Human-Centered Data Science is a textbook written by five founders of the field. It introduces best practices for addressing the bias and inequality that may result from the automated collection, analysis, and distribution of very large datasets. It offers a brief and accessible overview of many common statistical and algorithmic data science techniques, explains human-centred approaches to data science problems, and presents practical guidelines and real-world case studies to help readers apply these methods.

“Work hard, have fun, make history,” proclaims the slogan on the walls of Amazon’s ware – houses. This cheerful message hides a reality of digital surveillance, aggressive anti-union tactics and disciplinary layoffs. Reminiscent of the tumult of early industrial capitalism, the hundreds of thousands of workers who help Amazon fulfil consumers’ desire are part of an experiment in changing the way we all work. In this book, Alessandro Delfanti takes readers inside Amazon’s warehouses to show how technological advancements and managerial techniques subdue the workers rather than empower them, as seen in the sensors that track workers’ every movement around the floor and algorithmic systems that re-route orders to circumvent worker sabotage. He looks at new technologies including robotic arms trained by humans and augmented reality goggles, showing that their aim is to standardize, measure and discipline human work rather than replace it.

Digital Playgrounds explores the key developments, trends, debates, and controversies that have shaped children’s commercial digital play spaces over the past two decades. It argues that children’s online playgrounds, virtual worlds, and connected games are much more than mere sources of fun and diversion – they serve as the sites of complex negotiations of power between children, parents, developers, politicians, and other actors with a stake in determining what, how, and where children’s play unfolds.

While the visual history of the Vietnam War has been dominated by American documentaries and war photography, Phu turns to photographs circulated by the Vietnamese themselves, capturing a range of subjects, occasions, and perspectives. She explores photography from dispersed communities throughout Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, both during and after the Vietnam War, to complicate narratives of conflict and memory. Phu’s concept of warring visions refers to contrasts in the use of war photos in North Vietnam, which highlighted national liberation and aligned themselves with an international audience, and those in South Vietnam, which focused on family and everyday survival.

Disconnect explores the challenges users face when they try to deactivate their Facebook accounts, and how efforts by social media companies to keep users logging in may be giving us less control over our digital lives.

Social media companies, not surprisingly, see user disconnection as an existential threat and take wide-ranging efforts to fight it, Karppi says. For example, there are messages with photos saying, “This person will miss you if you leave,” he says. “When it comes right down to it, “leaving is hard or practically impossible for some.

Karpi says people who do disconnect often find themselves returning to Facebook because the company makes it easy, letting them pick up their accounts right where they left off.

A combination of factors makes the platform irresistible, he says. That includes engaging content that captures users’ attention and the fact that they are surrounded by a network of friends and followers.

Media for diasporic communities have emerged in major cities, such as Vancouver and Los Angeles, and reflect a multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual reality. Both conventional media and increasingly prevalent digital spaces link migrants locally in their new homes and globally with their old homes. But do these media serve their respective communities exclusively, or are they available and accessible to members of greater society at large? Using case studies of Korean media in Vancouver and Los Angeles, Sherry Yu examines the potential of an intercultural media system for culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse societies.

Writers’ Rights provides context for freelancers’ struggles and identifies the points of contention between journalists and big business. Through interviews and a survey of freelancers, Cohen highlights the paradoxes of freelancing, which can be simultaneously precarious and satisfying, risky and rewarding.

Communication has often been understood as a realm of immaterial, insubstantial phenomena—images, messages, thoughts, languages, cultures, and ideologies—mediating our embodied experience of the concrete world. Communication Matters challenges this view, assembling leading scholars in the fields of Communication, Rhetoric, and English to focus on the materiality of communication.