Ethics, Rights, Data Management
**Instructors: **Katie Shilton (iSchool), Ricky Punzalan (iSchool), Trevor Munoz(MITH) This third workshop in the Digital Humanities Incubator 2014-2015 series will explore ethical concerns, public memory, and data management strategies for research with the Ferguson Twitter dataset. A specific research question might be the impetus to collect social media data but, as soon as data collection begins, a variety of new challenges arise: what are the restrictions on how data might be used or published? who else can data be shared with? is the collected data a fair representation of the subject? what’s the best way to keep this data available and usable? These questions are especially vital when social media data is being used to study social justice issues. In this workshop we’ll review basic research ethics for public datasets, and then discuss unsolved ethical challenges for the use of Twitter data. We will also discuss strategies for ensuring best-effort ethical approaches in this emerging research space. We’ll also consider Twitter datasets as materials for current and future archives—how is this medium redefining archival sources and notions of historical evidence? If we think of this data as part of a historical record does that change our evaluation of how the collection of data we have reflects actual public sentiments (its representativeness), and what biases might it reflect or contain in its construction. Who/what is being remembered, and who/what is being forgotten, when we study and preserve such data? And, finally, in order to facilitate active research now and maintain this data into the future we’ll cover basic strategies for managing and maintaining social media data collected as part of research.
Speakers
Katie Shilton's research focuses on ethics and policy for the design of information technologies, systems, and collections in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. She received a B.A. from Oberlin College in 2003, a Master of Library and Information Science from UCLA in 2007, and a Ph.D. in Information Studies from UCLA in 2011. She teaches courses in information policy, information and technology ethics, and archival studies.
Trevor Muñoz is the Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). In this role, he provides management and strategic direction for MITH's portfolio of digital humanities research, community building, and teaching activities. His own current research is centered in a community-university collaborative dedicated to preserving and sharing the heritage of the historic African American community of Lakeland in College Park, Maryland, through community members' own voices. His previous work has focused on humanities approaches to data curation, the strategic opportunities and challenges of doing digital humanities work within the institutional and cultural structures of academic research libraries, and on the design and sustainability of interdisciplinary research collaborations. Muñoz is a member of the founding team of the African American History and Culture and Digital Humanities (AADHum) Initiative and has served, since 2017, as a Co-Principal Investigator for the major grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that supports AADHum. With Jennifer Guiliano, he serves as Co-Director of the Humanities Intensive Learning + Teaching (HILT) Institute. Before assuming the full-time leadership role at MITH, Muñoz previously served as the center's Associate Director and also as Assistant Dean for Digital Humanities Research in the University of Maryland Libraries. Muñoz holds an MA in Digital Humanities from the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London and an MS in Library and Information Science from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
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