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Investigating User Control to Mitigate Bias When Searching African Historical Data

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From Born-Physical to Born-Virtual: Augmenting Intelligence in Digital Libraries (ICADL 2022)

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Abstract

Historians have argued that common information retrieval algorithms may bias results presented to users searching through pre-colonial historical collections. This study therefore investigates how users experience and control bias in the context of commonly used information retrieval pre-processing algorithms for both the textual and image data that are available in typical historical archives. Users were presented with the results generated by multiple algorithmic variations, and the ability to select algorithms. The results show that users have justifiable preferences for multimodal result modes to improve user experience, and, that users believe they can control bias using algorithmic variation.

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Acknowledgements

This research was partially funded by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant numbers: 105862, 119121 and 129253) and University of Cape Town. The authors acknowledge that opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are that of the authors, and that the NRF accepts no liability whatsoever in this regard.

We would like to acknowledge the Archive & Public Culture research initiative at the University of Cape Town for allowing this research to use the Five Hundred Year Archive data collection for the purposes of this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

    Soham Singh & Hussein Suleman

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  1. Soham Singh
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  2. Hussein Suleman
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Correspondence to Hussein Suleman .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Yuen-Hsien Tseng

  2. Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan

    Marie Katsurai

  3. VNU University of Engineering and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam

    Hoa N. Nguyen

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Singh, S., Suleman, H. (2022). Investigating User Control to Mitigate Bias When Searching African Historical Data. In: Tseng, YH., Katsurai, M., Nguyen, H.N. (eds) From Born-Physical to Born-Virtual: Augmenting Intelligence in Digital Libraries. ICADL 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13636. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21756-2_37

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21756-2_37

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-21756-2

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