Peering down the Memory Hole: Censorship, Digitization, and the Fragility of Our Knowledge Base.
Technological and economic forces are radically restructuring our ecosystem of knowledge, and opening our information space increasingly to forms of digital disruption and manipulation that are scalable, difficult to detect, and corrosive of the trust upon which vigorous scholarship and liberal demo...
| Publicado en: | American Historical Review Vol. 124; no. 2; pp. 550 - 569 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Oxford University Press / USA
Apr2019
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=135824731&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 135824731 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00028762 AHS jtl: American Historical Review issn: 00028762 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Apr2019 vid: 124 iid: 2 pid: 622 pub: Oxford University Press / USA artinfo: ui: 135824731 10.1093/ahr/rhz286 ppf: 550 ppct: 19 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 6.5MB tig: atl: Peering down the Memory Hole: Censorship, Digitization, and the Fragility of Our Knowledge Base. aug: au: Tiffert, Glenn D. su: Knowledge base Censorship Chinese Communist Party Digitization Historical source material Chinese politics & government China sug: subj: China Knowledge base Censorship Chinese Communist Party Digitization Historical source material Chinese politics & government keyword: artificial intelligence censorship history law ab: Technological and economic forces are radically restructuring our ecosystem of knowledge, and opening our information space increasingly to forms of digital disruption and manipulation that are scalable, difficult to detect, and corrosive of the trust upon which vigorous scholarship and liberal democratic practice depend. Using an illustrative case from China, this article shows how a determined actor can exploit those vulnerabilities to tamper dynamically with the historical record. Briefly, Chinese knowledge platforms comparable to JSTOR are stealthily redacting their holdings, and globalizing historical narratives that have been sanitized to serve present political purposes. Using qualitative and computational methods, this article documents a sample of that censorship, reverse-engineers the logic behind it, and analyzes its discursive impact. Finally, the article demonstrates that machine learning models can now accurately reproduce the choices made by human censors, and warns that we are on the cusp of a new, algorithmic paradigm of information control and censorship that poses an existential threat to the foundations of all empirically grounded disciplines. At a time of ascendant illiberalism around the world, robust, collective safeguards are urgently required to defend the integrity of our source base, and the knowledge we derive from it. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: © 2019 The American Historical Association. item: American Historical Review holder: Oxford University Press / USA dt: @attributes: year: 2019 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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