In my previous post I showed how TED asks us to select certain attributes from their ‘I am’ list.  But how did they decide which attributes to enter on to the list? For example, they list 5 out of the top 7 religions (according to Wikipedia) but not Sikhism, even though there are more Sikhs than there are Jews in the world.

Gillespie (2012) cites the evaluation of relevance as one of the dimensions of public relevance algorithms.  He also points out that database producers are made distinctive more by what they choose to exclude.  We don’t know why TED chose to exclude Sikhs, or Bahai, from their list, but by doing so they have rendered them invisible.