Graduate Speaker Series

Thursday, October 12

3:30 - 5 p.m.

Annenberg Hall Room 4

About the Lecture

In Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age, Heather Ford looks critically at how the Wikipedia article about the 2011 Egyptian Revolution evolved over a decade, both shaping and being shaped by the revolution as it happened. Ford answers critical questions about how Wikipedia's consensus is arrived at; who has the power to write dominant histories and which knowledge is actively rejected; how these battles play out across the chains of circulation in which data travel; and whether algorithms now write history.

About the Author

Heather Ford is an associate professor in the School of Communications, the coordinator of the UTS Data and AI Ethics Cluster, an affiliate of the UTS Data Science Institute, and an associate of the UTS Centre for Media Transition at the University of Technology Sidney. She was appointed to the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE) in 2023. She is currently conducting research funded by the Australian Research Council and the Wikimedia Foundation on Wikipedia bias, question-and-answering technologies, digital literacy, and generative AI's impact on our information environment. 

She has a background working for global technology corporations and non-profits in the United States, United Kingdom, South Africa and Kenya.

A former Google policy fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, former executive director of iCommons and co-founder of Creative Commons South Africa, her research focuses on the social implications of media technologies and how they might be better designed to prevent misinformation, social exclusion and harms as a result of algorithmic bias.