Opening Up Research for the Greater Good? Ethics, Privacy, and Data

In the current political climate, opening up access to research and research data can be both a moral imperative and a careless decision that puts the lives and livelihood of the most vulnerable at risk. In this panel discussion and roundtable, three scholars will discuss the social and ethical responsibilities of gathering, curating, and sharing data from very different perspectives.

Presentation descriptions below. Register Here

Manan Ahmed, “Torn Apart/Separados: Visualizing Data for/with Critical Eyes”
My talk will center on the team-led data-curation and visualization project from spring and summer 2018 which focused on the activities of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after the announcement of a policy of family-separation at the southwest borders of United States. I will discuss the ways in which scholars and activists used the Data was used to reveal a hidden cartography of forced separation as well as the ethical concerns of data-curation which led them to re-think the role of visualization in public awareness campaigns. My talk will rely on conversations, ideas, expertise, and intellectual labor of the entire team behind #TornApart/Separados fully credited at the site: http://xpmethod.plaintext.in/torn-apart/credits.html.

Laurie Allen, “Open Data, Data Rescue, and Risk”
In this talk, Laurie will return to the fall and winter of 2016/2017 when she joined with collaborators in the Penn Libraries, Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, and many others to start Data Refuge. Over the first 6 months of 2017, they supported more than 50 events around the country in an effort to document and save federally produced Environmental and Climate Data. Now nearly two years after that project began, she’ll reflect on those data saving efforts, risks, and the responses to risk.

Mary Marshall Clark, “Documenting Truth in a Time of Denial and Surveillance: Ethical Dilemmas Oral Historians Face”
Drawing upon political oral history projects conducted by the Columbia Center for Oral History, and mentoring Oral History MA students who use oral history to document the historical present, I will talk about the challenges of using oral history to address the human rights challenges of our times. As oral history moves into a deeper engagement with human rights and commits to making its archives transparent and relevant, we are also faced with new levels of technical surveillance, monitoring and danger in using named sources. Simultaneously our ethics demand that we use our increasing ability to work across borders, often under the radar, to collect narratives and build historical evidence towards the goal of achieving historical truths that counter mass media, and/or government accounts. How do we protect ourselves, and our sources, in doing this crucial work?