A Survey of Digital Humanities Skillshare Applications

A key requirement of a digital humanities project is the ability to collaborate and share data with other digital humanists. In this paper, I examine skillshare community formats and core values and review a number of technical platforms for hosting digital humanities projects on the Web with the goal of selecting a platform that is appropriate for a skillshare project of the Pratt SILS LIS 657 Digital Humanities course

Shedding Light on Dark Patterns: A Case Study on Digital Harms

You’ve been there before. You thought you could trust someone with a secret. You thought it would be safe, but found out later that they blabbed to everyone. Or maybe they didn’t share it, but the way they used it felt manipulative. You gave more than you got and it didn’t feel fair. But now that it’s out there, do you even have control anymore? Ok. Now imagine that person was your supermarket. Or your bank. Or your boss. As designers of digital spaces for consumer products and services, how often do we consider the relationship we have with our customers? What does they need to know about us and what do we need to know about them before we can say we are “in a relationship”? Are we spying on our users? Do they know what information we are collecting about them? Or how we collect that information? Are we manipulating users? How much information is really needed? Are we gathering more than we need, just because we can? Are we using it to force actions the users wouldn’t normally make? Are we keeping our promises? Are we being good custodians of our user’s information? Who are we sharing it with? Do we know what they do with our user’s information? Are we designing dark patterns without knowing it? Also, is the term “Dark Pattern” itself a dark pattern? In this talk, Noreen Whysel will discuss a framework for evaluating the relationship that digital technologies have with consumers and the digital harms and dark (or anti-) patterns that, whether we know it or not, violate that relationship. You will come away with an understanding of how to determine that what you are creating is fair, secure and in the user’s control. And that your relationship will be sound, respectful and long lasting

Designing Respectful Tech: What is your relationship with technology?

According to research at the Me2B Alliance, people feel they have a relationship with technology. It’s emotional. It’s embodied. And it’s very personal. We are studying digital relationships to answer questions like “Do people have a relationship with technology?” “What does that relationship feel like?” And “Do people understand the commitments that they are making when they explore, enter into and dissolve these relationships?” There are parallels between messy human relationships and the kinds of relationships that people develop with technology. As with human relationships, we move through states of discovery, commitment and breakup with digital applications as well. Technology enables data sharing at every point of the relationship arc, including after you stop using it. Worryingly, even our more trusted digital relationships may not be safe. Most of the technologies that you (and your children) use have relationships with third party data brokers and others with whom they share your data. Each privacy policy, cookie consent and terms of use document on every website or mobile app you use defines a legal relationship, whether you choose to opt in or are locked in by some other process. That means you have a legal relationship with each of these entities from the moment you accessed the app or website, and in most cases, it’s one that you initiated and agreed to. In this article, I discuss a specification for safe and respectfully designed digital technologies and how I applied information architecture principles to provide a solid framework for understanding digital relationships as well as structuring meaning. Because we aren’t just designing information spaces. We’re designing healthy relationships

Spotlight Report #3: Me2B Alliance Validation Research: Consumer Sensitivity to Location Tracking by Websites and Mobile App

This research was conducted to validate the Location Commitment scoring criteria in the Me2B Alliance Respectful Technology Specification. The objective of the study was to understand if the requirements and passing criteria of select location tests in the Me2BA Respectful Technology Specification are appropriate. Toward that end, we conducted quantitative and qualitative studies of consumer perception and tolerance for location awareness by digital technologies. The studies explored participant understanding of what a location request is, how consumers feel about such awareness, and what are the specific parameters and scenarios that make location awareness acceptable. The core of the research was an online survey of 363 people, in which we looked at respondent’s sentiments towards websites or mobile apps that are location aware, explored how having an account affected respondent’s feelings about location awareness, and examined how different scenarios and contexts might affect respondent’s choice of what location information was acceptable, when, and for how long. We also reviewed other interviews and focus groups studies conducted by the Me2B Alliance, in which participants discussed the kinds of information they share with digital technologies. Two primary research questions guided our work: How do people feel when a website or mobile app automatically knows their location? Under what conditions is it acceptable for a website or mobile app to know one’s location? Based on this research, we find that, for people to consider it acceptable for a digital product to know their location, two essential conditions must be met The person must have agency over granting access to location information, and There needs to be a legitimate and understandable need for location info. Our research supports the scoring rubric in the Internet Safety Labs Safe Software Specification. Based on this work, we are confident that the current scoring for passing/failing behavior related to a website or mobile app’s location awareness in the Internet Safety Labs Safe Software Specification accurately reflects the tolerances and sensitivities of individual Me-s and works towards ensuring respectful behavior for digital technologies

Spotlight Report #6: Proffering Machine-Readable Personal Privacy Research Agreements: Pilot Project Findings for IEEE P7012 WG

What if people had the ability to assert their own legally binding permissions for data collection, use, sharing, and retention by the technologies they use? The IEEE P7012 has been working on an interoperability specification for machine-readable personal privacy terms to support this ability since 2018. The premise behind the work of IEEE P7012 is that people need technology that works on their behalf—i.e. software agents that assert the individual’s permissions and preferences in a machine-readable format. Thanks to a grant from the IEEE Technical Activities Board Committee on Standards (TAB CoS), we were able to explore the attitudes of people and one small business toward having the ability for people to send their own legally binding privacy terms to the business. The project entailed building a prototype “Relationship Manager” webservice called, “MyMe2BAgent”, and then performing validation testing with both types of users of the agent: individual users (“Me-s) and the business (“B”). The primary research questions for the validation research were: For Me-s:• Do people want the ability to send their own legally binding ISA to service providers?• Do people want a data management dashboard for managing the personal information that gets shared with all service providers? For the business (B):• What was it like to integrate the ability to receive a personal privacy agreement? Is it scalable? Is it something you would want to support going forward

Linked Open Data for Cultural Heritage: Evolution of an Information Technology

Communication design encompasses how information is structured behind the scenes, as much as how the information is shared across networks (Potts & Albers). Information architecture can profoundly alter our perceptions of society and culture (Swarts). Today cultural heritage institutions like libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) are searching for new ways to engage and educate patrons. This paper examines how linked open data (LOD) can solve the communication design problems that these institutions face and help LAM patrons and new meaning in cultural heritage artifacts

Linked Open Data for Cultural Heritage: Evolution of an Information Technology

Communication design encompasses how information is structured behind the scenes, as much as how the information is shared across networks (Potts & Albers). Information architecture can profoundly alter our perceptions of society and culture (Swarts). Today cultural heritage institutions like libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) are searching for new ways to engage and educate patrons. This paper examines how linked open data (LOD) can solve the communication design problems that these institutions face and help LAM patrons and new meaning in cultural heritage artifacts

Accessibility Compliance and Assessments for Gateway Websites in Life Sciences: Toward Inclusive Design

One main purpose of information architecture and site navigation is to enhance the effectiveness of user interfaces (UIs) by supporting and enabling task completion, accessibility, and sustainability. This is of particular importance for science gateways given the complexity of information on portal sites. We examined the accessibility of 50 randomly selected gateway websites in the Life Sciences category in the Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) catalog, using both manual and automated methodologies. None of these sites produced an accessible website as per W3C, WCAG 2.1, and Section 508 standards. The most common accessibility success in these websites was URL structure, which enables web browsers and search engines to access content

Me2B Alliance Validation Testing Report: Consumer Perception of Legal Policies in Digital Technology

Our relationship with technology involves legal agreements that we either review or enter into when using a technology, namely privacy policies and terms of service or terms of use (“TOS/TOU”). We initiated this research to understand if providing a formal rating of the legal policies (privacy policies and TOS/TOUs) would be valuable to consumers (or Me-s). From our early qualitative discussions, we noticed that people were unclear on whether these policies were legally binding contracts or not. Thus, a secondary objective emerged to quantitatively explore whether people knew who these policies protected (if anyone), and if the policies were perceived to be contracts with the provider of the digital technology (or “B”). The purpose of a privacy policy is notification and disclosure, not protection. Privacy policies are not designed to protect anyone, they’re designed to inform. The TOS/TOU, on the other hand, is an agreement relating to the use of the technology or service and is typically designed to protect the business. Do Me-s understand this? We conducted ethnographic interviews with six participants living in the United States, during a two-week period from February to March 2021. We followed these interviews with a focus group session of five participants in July 2021 and an online survey of 566 individuals in August 2021. In these studies, we asked participants and survey respondents who they think the privacy policy and TOS/TOU protect and whether they perceived these policies to be enforceable contracts. We hope that the findings in this research can help illuminate and eventually eliminate the pervasive asymmetry in Me2B relationships and be a concrete resource to lawyers supporting Me-s in legal cases relating to digital agreements

Linked Open Data for Cultural Heritage

This paper surveys the landscape of linked open data projects in cultural heritage, examining the work of groups from around the world. Traditionally, linked open data has been ranked using the five star method proposed by Tim Berners-Lee. We found this ranking to be lacking when evaluating how cultural heritage groups not merely develop linked open datasets, but find ways to use linked data to augment user experience. Building on the five-star method, we developed a six-stage life cycle describing both dataset development and dataset usage. We use this framework to describe and evaluate fifteen linked open data projects in the realm of cultural heritage