14,278 research outputs found

    Life editing: Third-party perspectives on lifelog content

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    Lifelog collections digitally capture and preserve personal experiences and can be mined to reveal insights and understandings of individual significance. These rich data sources also offer opportunities for learning and discovery by motivated third parties. We employ a custom-designed storytelling application in constructing meaningful lifelog summaries from third-party perspectives. This storytelling initiative was implemented as a core component in a university media-editing course. We present promising results from a preliminary study conducted to evaluate the utility and potential of our approach in creatively interpreting a unique experiential dataset

    Empowerment or Engagement? Digital Health Technologies for Mental Healthcare

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    We argue that while digital health technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, smartphones, and virtual reality) present significant opportunities for improving the delivery of healthcare, key concepts that are used to evaluate and understand their impact can obscure significant ethical issues related to patient engagement and experience. Specifically, we focus on the concept of empowerment and ask whether it is adequate for addressing some significant ethical concerns that relate to digital health technologies for mental healthcare. We frame these concerns using five key ethical principles for AI ethics (i.e. autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, and explicability), which have their roots in the bioethical literature, in order to critically evaluate the role that digital health technologies will have in the future of digital healthcare

    Open Data, Grey Data, and Stewardship: Universities at the Privacy Frontier

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    As universities recognize the inherent value in the data they collect and hold, they encounter unforeseen challenges in stewarding those data in ways that balance accountability, transparency, and protection of privacy, academic freedom, and intellectual property. Two parallel developments in academic data collection are converging: (1) open access requirements, whereby researchers must provide access to their data as a condition of obtaining grant funding or publishing results in journals; and (2) the vast accumulation of 'grey data' about individuals in their daily activities of research, teaching, learning, services, and administration. The boundaries between research and grey data are blurring, making it more difficult to assess the risks and responsibilities associated with any data collection. Many sets of data, both research and grey, fall outside privacy regulations such as HIPAA, FERPA, and PII. Universities are exploiting these data for research, learning analytics, faculty evaluation, strategic decisions, and other sensitive matters. Commercial entities are besieging universities with requests for access to data or for partnerships to mine them. The privacy frontier facing research universities spans open access practices, uses and misuses of data, public records requests, cyber risk, and curating data for privacy protection. This paper explores the competing values inherent in data stewardship and makes recommendations for practice, drawing on the pioneering work of the University of California in privacy and information security, data governance, and cyber risk.Comment: Final published version, Sept 30, 201

    Human Security Informatics, Global Grand Challenges and Digital Curation

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    This paper argues that addressing humanitarian issues and concerns about social and societal inequities that are integral to many societal grand challenges needs to become a concerted and sustained focus of digital curation. It proposes a new framing emanating out of the archival and record-keeping community – Human Security Informatics (HSI) – for human and humanitarian-centered rather than data, artifact or research-centered digital curation research and development. Human security is proposed as a new concept that promotes the protection and advancement of individuals and communities. It prioritizes individual agency and rights, and human-centered and multidisciplinary approaches that support democratization, transparency and accountability in trans- and supra-national governance and policy-making. Within this ethos, HSI specifically targets data, documentary, record-keeping and other accountability and evidentiary components of societal grand challenges. In so doing it necessarily highlights curation grand challenges, and demands the reorientation of some fundamental assumptions of digital curation relating to technological, economic and policy infrastructure priorities and standards, trust, scale, universality and content-centricity. To illustrate its argument, two research endeavors are discussed. The first is an Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI) study that analyzed six areas of societal grand challenges and identified key, and often overlooked, areas where HSI could and should contribute. The analysis also surfaced grand challenges facing the digital curation community itself, many with particular applicability to digital curation capacity, processes and priorities in bureaucratic archives. The second is the Refugee Rights in Records (R3) Project, an example of wide-ranging HSI research that is focused on data, social media content and record-keeping, as well as on individual human rights in and to records and documentation. In both examples the paper identifies several specific areas of relevance to digital curation where an HSI approach would be appropriate

    Managing Digital Collections: Case Studies in the Ethics of Privacy

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    This session explores the often unforeseen challenges and issues associated with the creation and management of digital collections and the privacy concerns that can arise. We will explore how to handle the need for digital anonymity on the part of content creators facing issues such as stalking, harassment, and violence. We will also discuss how to deal with the need for privacy when it stems from issues such as plagiarism and false claims of ownership that are almost always unexpected. We will offer possible solutions and creative ways in which FIU has helped its students, faculty, and researchers maintain their privacy, while simultaneously balancing our institutional goals of open access and accessibility of resources. Our hope is to provide a framework of best practices based on these examples

    AAPOR Report on Big Data

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    In recent years we have seen an increase in the amount of statistics in society describing different phenomena based on so called Big Data. The term Big Data is used for a variety of data as explained in the report, many of them characterized not just by their large volume, but also by their variety and velocity, the organic way in which they are created, and the new types of processes needed to analyze them and make inference from them. The change in the nature of the new types of data, their availability, the way in which they are collected, and disseminated are fundamental. The change constitutes a paradigm shift for survey research.There is a great potential in Big Data but there are some fundamental challenges that have to be resolved before its full potential can be realized. In this report we give examples of different types of Big Data and their potential for survey research. We also describe the Big Data process and discuss its main challenges

    A Theoretical Framework and Practical Toolkit for Ethical Library Assessment

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    Praktiker:innen stehen bei der Bewertung bzw. Evaluation von Bibliotheken unter doppeltem Druck, den Wert der Bibliothek zu demonstrieren und gleichzeitig die Werte der bibliothekarischen Profession einzuhalten. Um eine Praxis der Bibliotheksevaluation zu unterstĂŒtzen, die sowohl den Wert der Bibliothek als auch die bibliothekarische Werte anspricht, untersucht diese Dissertation die Praxis der Bibliotheksevaluation durch die Perspektive praktischer Ethik und angewandter Werte. Die Hauptforschungsfrage lautet: „Wie kann Bibliotheksbewertung ethisch durchgefĂŒhrt werden?“ Ich folgte einem dreistufigen Forschungsdesign: eine Literaturrecherche, eine Umfrage und Interviews. Die Literaturrecherche konzentriert sich auf die Ethik, Werte, Dilemmata und Praktiken von Bewertungspraktiker:innen. Eine vignettenbasierte Umfrage untersuchte Werte und Ethik bei der Bewertung von Bibliotheken weiter. Die Umfragedaten wurden mittels der konstruktivistischen Grounded Theory analysiert und die daraus resultierenden Codes etablierten ein neues Rahmenwerk und ein neues Instrument fĂŒr die ethische Bewertung von Bibliotheken. Schließlich wurde das Instrument mit dem Namen Values-Sensitive Library Assessment Toolkit durch Interviews mit Bewertungspraktiker:innen validiert. Die Forschungsergebnisse zeigen, dass Praktiker:innen der Bibliotheksbewertung eine ethische Praxis anstreben, aber durch eine komplexe und dezentralisierte Wertelandschaft herausgefordert werden, die viele konkurrierende Möglichkeiten zur Identifizierung und Umsetzung von Werten bietet. Das Toolkit dient dazu, einen Satz von Werten zu modellieren, den Praktiker:innen anwenden können, um eine ethische Bewertungspraxis zu unterstĂŒtzen.Library assessment practitioners face dual pressures to demonstrate library value and adhere to library values. To support a practice of library assessment that addresses both library value and library values, this dissertation examines the practice of library assessment through the lens of practical ethics and applied values. The main research question asks, “How can library assessment be practiced ethically?” I followed a three-step research design: a literature review, a survey, and interviews. The literature review focuses on the ethics, values, dilemmas, and practices of library assessment practitioners. A vignette-based survey further investigated values and ethics in assessment. Survey data was analyzed through constructivist grounded theory, and the resulting set of codes established a new framework and toolkit for ethical library assessment. Finally, the toolkit—named the Values-Sensitive Library Assessment Toolkit—was validated through interviews with assessment practitioners. Research findings indicate that library assessment practitioners seek an ethical practice, but are challenged by a complex and decentralized values landscape that offers many competing choices for identifying and implementing values. The toolkit serves to model a value set that practitioners can apply to support an ethical assessment practice

    The Politics of Being an Archival Donor: Defining the Affective Relationship Between Archival Donors and Archivists

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    Traditional archival praxis oftentimes depicts the archival donor as an observer and recipient of services or benefits. One that can either comply with the rules and expectations set forth by the archivist and archival institution when donating their materials or walk away from the process and opportunity. Despite the historic role of donor contributions in the form of archival donations, donors and their needs remain overlooked in much of the archival literature. Instead, current archival paradigms tend to focus more on the archival materials more so than the people behind them. But what if donors and archivists could reimagine their relationship and the ethical obligations associated with this bond? This article applies Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor’s archival theory of radical empathy combined with the theoretical framework of political consciousness as set forth by Black feminism. Using these frameworks, the research study uses a mixed method approach that includes a literature review of relationships in the archival field and a qualitative conventional content analysis of collected interview data from the donor case study of living music artist donors. As archivists seek to improve collection development and acquisition practices more attention must be placed on the care, affirmation, and wellbeing of the archival donor. Through collaboration with donors, archivists can strengthen archival practices by centering people and not just the things. By combining an ethics of care which introduces “a web of mutual affective responsibility” alongside the construction of a donor political consciousness, this article shows how donor participation contributes and strengthen archival practices that center people and not just things. The article and findings offer a distinct pathway to better understand the challenges, limitations, and possibilities of donor relationships and the benefits of donors recognizing the importance of active participation and understanding of their role in the archival process. Pre-print first published online 02/26/202

    Ethics in Pragmatics

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    This paper compiles a series of useful resources, which should act as pointers for decisionmaking processes for ethics in pragmatics.We show why ethical considerations are central to good academic practice, and key to protecting the interlocutors and informants whose practices we wish to study. In doing do, we advocate adopting an understanding of ethical decision making as a process, and not the result of a single decision made at the outset of research (cf. e.g., Markham and Buchanan, 2012). As we delineate in this chapter, this approach is key, given that there are not always straightforward, easy solutions to ethical desiderata. To ensure that scholars can benefit from the ethical-decision making processes other scholars have undergone, we thus advocate that scholars include brief discussions of the ethical measures underlining the research presented in their work. This transparency would serve to encourage a conversation among scholars within and across research disciplines and for greater recognition of the importance and relevance of seeing ethics as a process

    Unruly Records: Personal Archives, Sociotechnical Infrastructure, and Archival Practice

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    Personal records have long occupied a complicated space within archival theory and practice. The archival profession, as it is practiced in the United States today, developed with organizational records, such as those created by governments and businesses, in mind. Personal records were considered to fall beyond the bounds of archival work and were primarily cared for by libraries and other cultural heritage institutions. Since the mid-20th century, this divide has become less pronounced, and it has become common to find personal records within archival institutions. As a result of these conditions in the development of the profession, the archivists who work with personal records have had to reconcile the specific characteristics of personal materials with theoretical and practical approaches that were designed not only to accommodate organizational records but to explicitly exclude personal records. These conditions have been further complicated by the continually changing technological landscape in which personal records are now created. As ownership of personal computers, access to the World Wide Web, and the use of networked social platforms have grown, personal records have increasingly come to be created, stored, and accessed within complex socio-technical systems. The infrastructures that support personal digital record creation today precipitate new methods and strategies, and an abundance of new questions, for the archivists who are responsible for collecting and preserving digital cultural heritage. This dissertation considers how both the history of excluding personal records in the archival profession and the socio-technical systems that support contemporary personal record creation impact archival practice today. This research considers archival approaches to working with personal records created within three environments: personal computers, the open web, and networked social platforms. Ultimately, this dissertation seeks to reevaluate the role that personal records have previously occupied, and to center the personal in archival practice today
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