From d3bd909a5c272b6f0ddbc2f95bc0bcdf66f95f0a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jeremy Kidwell Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2018 11:18:59 -0600 Subject: [PATCH 1/4] adding rel="me" for indyweb compliance --- layouts/partials/meta.html | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/layouts/partials/meta.html b/layouts/partials/meta.html index b48a30a..9a09881 100755 --- a/layouts/partials/meta.html +++ b/layouts/partials/meta.html @@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ - + From 854a210d6be9607dc1182f9287124a68768f1f7a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jeremy Kidwell Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2018 11:33:42 -0600 Subject: [PATCH 2/4] more indyweb customisation Working with guide at https://www.amitgawande.com/indiewebify-hugo-website --- layouts/partials/footer.html | 11 +++++++++-- layouts/partials/head.html | 1 + 2 files changed, 10 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/layouts/partials/footer.html b/layouts/partials/footer.html index 006d0dc..271ba43 100755 --- a/layouts/partials/footer.html +++ b/layouts/partials/footer.html @@ -1,5 +1,12 @@ - - +

+ + {{ .Site.Author.name }} + / + + +

diff --git a/layouts/partials/head.html b/layouts/partials/head.html index b619518..71131e7 100755 --- a/layouts/partials/head.html +++ b/layouts/partials/head.html @@ -14,5 +14,6 @@ + From e72cf3a64ef54290b6df94558cf16f8d886187b2 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jeremy Kidwell Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2018 21:11:51 -0600 Subject: [PATCH 3/4] further rel=me --- layouts/partials/whatisthis.html | 6 +++--- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/layouts/partials/whatisthis.html b/layouts/partials/whatisthis.html index be199ef..909e5f3 100755 --- a/layouts/partials/whatisthis.html +++ b/layouts/partials/whatisthis.html @@ -11,9 +11,9 @@

Where

From 7a5bc2cb5495ba77dd11e1490f1ba9406be9850e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jeremy Kidwell Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2018 12:45:42 +0100 Subject: [PATCH 4/4] updated UG diss faq --- content/blog/ug_diss_faq.md | 47 ++++++-- .../data_ethics-law_course/01-Overview.md | 6 +- .../data_ethics-law_course/02-Session1.md | 18 +-- .../data_ethics-law_course/03-Session2.md | 6 +- .../data_ethics-law_course/04-Session3.md | 8 +- ...can-you-use-stuff-online-for-research.html | 54 ++++++--- ...tiality-anonymity-consent-and-privacy.html | 88 ++++++++++++--- ...pyright-licenses-and-data-as-property.html | 60 ++++++---- ...ring-the-world-of-user-generated-data.html | 106 ++++++++++++++---- ...nal-steps-how-do-we-decide-what-to-do.html | 49 +++++--- .../data_ethics-law_course/index.html | 43 ++++--- .../data_ethics-law_course/search_index.json | 17 +-- 12 files changed, 362 insertions(+), 140 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/blog/ug_diss_faq.md b/content/blog/ug_diss_faq.md index 149cba1..5a98703 100644 --- a/content/blog/ug_diss_faq.md +++ b/content/blog/ug_diss_faq.md @@ -17,25 +17,56 @@ Last updated: Undergraduate Dissertation FAQ -1. When is the thesis due +1. When is the thesis due? + +You should become very familiar with the handbook for the Dissertation course. It has all the details you need regarding deadlines. 2. How do supervisions work? -We meet once a month, for a total of 7 meetings (the first is for planning and subsequent meetings are to discuss progress). For each of the subsequent six supervisions, I'll expect you to send me some form of written work that we can use as the basis for our discussion no less than 3 working days in advance of our meeting. Ideally, we should schedule these meetings in advance so you can plan towards these deadlines as writing milestones. You should also bear in mind that supervisors are not allowed to review written work in the final month of your dissertation period, though in light of what I note below, this shouldn't be an issue as hopefully by this time you'll be an independent writer! +We meet once a month, for a total of 7 meetings (the first is for planning and subsequent meetings are to discuss progress). For each of the subsequent six supervisions, I'll expect you to send me some form of written work that we can use as the basis for our discussion *no less than 3 working days in advance of our meeting*. I prefer to schedule out the whole year's worth of meetings in advance so we can both plan towards these deadlines as writing milestones. You should also bear in mind that supervisors are not allowed to review written work in the final month of your dissertation period, though in light of what I note below, this shouldn't be an issue as hopefully by this time you'll be an independent writer! 3. What kind of supervisor am I? -Of all the work you'll complete during your degree programme, the dissertation is the piece of work which you have the most ownership over. On the basis of this, I approach supervisions as a kind of coaching - I will be ready to answer any questions you have that have arisen during your research and writing, whether about writing mechanics, the research process, or about your topic more specifically. I will also raise probing questions for you, drawing on examples from written work I have been able to review in order to highlight problems or issues more broadly for you as a writer. I will not provide a proofreading service (you should recruit a good friend or two to help with this), so you should always bear in mind that mark-up and feedback is not comprehensive. I expect you to take notes from our discussions and then review your work to find all the areas where my feedback may be relevant. +Of all the work you'll complete during your degree programme, the dissertation is the piece of work which you have the most ownership over. On the basis of this, I approach supervisions as a kind of coaching - I will be ready to answer any questions you have that have arisen during your research and writing, whether about writing mechanics, the research process, or about your topic more specifically. I will also raise probing questions for you, drawing on examples from written work I have been able to review in order to highlight problems or issues more broadly for you as a writer. I will not provide a proofreading service (you should recruit a good friend or two to help with this), so you should always bear in mind that mark-up and feedback is not comprehensive, that is, you shouldn't expect that anything I haven't written on is perfect and shouldn't be revised. I expect you to take notes from our discussions and then review your work to find all the areas where my feedback may be relevant. 4. How do I format my bibliography? Citations? Title Page? Table of contents... -We have a flexible policy regarding citation style, it's up to you to choose the one that you are most familiar with and then apply that style consistently throughout your dissertation. Please note - I will not serve as a reference for specific aspects of formatting. This is one of the aspects of independent research you should master early on in your research journey (if you haven't already). Each major referencing style has a styleguide which covers all the intricacies of formatting as well as other aspects including table of contents formatting, headings, and really anything you could possibly imagine. Given how frequently you may have questions about this, you should strongly consider purchasing a paperback copy of the style guide. Most frequently used styles, in order of my personal preference are: +We have a flexible policy regarding citation style, so it's up to you to choose the one that you are most familiar with and then apply that style consistently throughout your dissertation. Please note - I will not serve as a reference for specific aspects of formatting. This is one of the aspects of independent research you should master early on in your research journey (if you haven't already). Each major referencing style has a style guide which covers all the intricacies of formatting as well as other aspects including table of contents formatting, headings, and really anything you could possibly imagine. Given how frequently you may have questions about this, you should purchase a paperback copy of the style guide which will tell you how to format references, number pages, write a table of contents etc. If you don't already have a preference, I'd suggest you go with Chicago Style (a.k.a. Turabian) as it is generally favoured by Theology, Religious Studies, History, and Philosophy. Chicago has both short and long form versions. As above, you can pick one, but if it's up to me, I'd prefer the notes and bibliography format, where you provide longer form versions of citations in footnotes and repeat them in your bibliography. There is an online version of this style guide here: [http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html] -a. Chicago Style (a.k.a. Turabian) +5. How many books should I read for a dissertation? -Generally favoured by Theology, Religious Studies, History, and Philosophy Chicago has both short and long form versions. As above, you can pick one. +There is no straight-forward way to answer this question, as every dissertation question is quite unique. I tend to favour a style of research that begins by hoovering up as much information as possible, reading a large pile of scholarly materials very quickly so as to get a sense of the breadth of opinion on your topic. Once you have reached an intuitive point of "saturation," you can circle back around to materials that you know to be seminal or particularly relevant to your research and read them more closely so that you can engage with the author's arguments in your own writing. This style of reading is summarised in a now very old book by Mortimer Adler called "How to Read a Book" (1940, revised edition in 1972), which has been come to be called the [Structure-proposition-evaluation method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_(process)#Methods_of_reading) of reading. I recommend you read Adler's book (quickly!), but you can also find a quick summary here: (https://fourminutebooks.com/how-to-read-a-book-summary/). PS, don't write in library books. PPS, don't bother with Adler's recommended reading list. +So to circle back around to the original question... some rough unqualified estimates: (1) In the hoovering stage, you shouldn't read fewer than a dozen books and 3 dozen journal articles. (2) In the critical reading stage, you can focus in on a half dozen books and a dozen articles. But this is really just a rule of thumb - we'll work out a proper ratio in supervision. -Online guide: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html +6. Which books / articles should I read for my dissertation? -5. How many books should I read for a dissertation? \ No newline at end of file +7. How can I measure my progress? + +I like to think about scheduling this writing project by working backwards from the final deadline. So, assuming that your final draft is due for submission in March and that we can't discuss your writing any further at that stage, you should (3) plan to have a penultimate rough draft completed by the start of February. It's important to give yourself a month for revising, as your project will have matured significantly and you'll need time to rework and rewrite earlier materials, possibly quite radically. This means that (2) Dec-Jan should involve some serious writing, potentially 8-12k words. To varying degrees, (1) you should think of the first 2 months of dissertation work (Sep/Oct-Nov) as exploratory. You will be focussing much of your time on reading and taking notes, writing literature survey, book precis, and outlines of your project, and thinking through your methodology. If you prefer to take the writing more slowly, or work in a more compartmentalised way, i.e. researching for and writing each chapter at a time, we can do that too, so you'd finish a chapter each month starting in October, and then have February for revising. The downside of this approach is that you may need to rewrite one or more of those early chapters as your thinking develops and matures over the length of the project. Some people also like to do preliminary research over the preceding Spring and Summer - this is a good idea if you want to take the writing more slowly and work over your ideas, and also if you need to do data collection for your project. + +Ultimately, it is up to you to choose a schedule for your project, so think hard about your personality and how you've worked best on long projects (not even necessarily writing ones) in the past. + +8. How do I find books and articles for my dissertation? + +In this age of social media and digital archives, you'll be working primarily with search engines. However, it's important to do "smart searching" which relates both to what key words and phrases you search for as well as how you use the technology. Finding the right "key words" and phrases is an art, and one which you will get better at with time. So you should practice running phrases and words through searches to see what comes up. I recommend working with Google Scholar to begin with, and then you can work with more tailored tools, like the University library findit@bham search engine. + +Here's an example of how I use this tool to run a literature search. A good search in google scholar should return less than 100 items. So, for example, "just war" returns over 4 million items. This is the definition of a terrible search. One search trick which will help significantly here is to treat just war as a phrase, so put it in double quotation marks for the search engine. The difference here is that you won't just get every item which is about "just" or "war" but only those things which are about `"just war"`. Big difference - now you've got just under 100k items, which means that it's getting a bit better, but still unusuable. It's good to work with contemporary literature to begin with, so try limiting the search to items written in the last decade. Just click on "custom range" on the sidebar and type in 2008 to the first box and click search. Now we're down to 19k items. Getting better. Another way to identify important articles is to notice how many times they are cited. If something has been cited more than 100 times, that is, quoted in another book or article, that's a good rule of thumb for something being generally applicable. So you might want to scan quickly for items with high citation counts before refining your list further. + +A few other ideas for reducing your searchers to manageable lengths: + +You can add some more keywords as well alongside "just war". So if, for example, we add "land mines" to the search (make sure this is also in double quotes as a phrase!) we're down to just 580 results. You can get through a list this long in an hour if you're just scanning the summaries and titles. So this is something you can work with. + +You might also think about limiting your search to items that have your key words only in the title. To do this in google scholar, just add the word intitle: before your search, so it looks like this: + +`intitle:"just war"` + +Throughout this process, you should be noting down things that seem possibly relevant to your research. Now rinse and repeat - start a new search with a different starting point. You get the idea. + +9. How can I tell what mark my dissertation will get? + +This is a hard question. My primary interest in the dissertation process, to the frustration of some supervisees is generally oriented around the quality of the work. This can lead to a range of very different outcomes depending on how mature your thinking is on a given topic and how much time you've invested along the way. So I'm going to tell you quite honestly if I don't think you're working up to your own standards, but I can't set a benchmark mid-way through your project. In almost every case, your thinking will mature and develop on your topic right up to the point of submission, so quite a lot hinges on leaving time for and investing in final revision of your thesis. Until we get to the final product, I can only assess how a given chapter or intellectual exploration is doing, and there's no way of knowing how this will predict the whole product. If you really want to get some kind of benchmark for your writing, you can review the bank of assessed work on canvas to see some samples of other dissertations. However, at this point in your scholarly career, I'd suggest that you intrinsically are the best measure of your progress. You will know how much effort has led in past writing to certain outcomes, and should be able to judge your work on the thesis against these past outcomes. If you're anxious about the mark, my primary advice to you is to pace yourself. Make sure that you have time at the end to revise well, and make sure that you devote time at the beginning to adequately researching your topic. A good thesis is a blend of eloquence and scholarly knowledge. + +10. Anything else? + +I expect we'll work through all kinds of other items in supervision and am excited to see how your project is developing! diff --git a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/01-Overview.md b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/01-Overview.md index 6af86fd..72c9edf 100644 --- a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/01-Overview.md +++ b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/01-Overview.md @@ -2,9 +2,11 @@ In this video, we discuss the overarching question that occupies this module. You can watch the video, and read the transcript below. -## iframe / video here +## Lecture -## Video Transcript: +### iframe / video here + +### Video Transcript: JK: In this module, we'd like to focus on a particular question: diff --git a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/02-Session1.md b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/02-Session1.md index 83f9eee..946378a 100644 --- a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/02-Session1.md +++ b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/02-Session1.md @@ -1,8 +1,10 @@ # Exploring the world of user-generated data -## Video +## Lecture -## Transcript (Jeremy Kidwell speaking) +### Video + +### Transcript (Jeremy Kidwell speaking) You've probably heard by now of the company "Cambridge Analytica" [recently renamed to Emerdata](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/02/cambridge_analytica_shutdown/). As several media outlets reported in 2017, a little known firm called Cambridge analytica surprised many by claiming that their "evolutionary approach to data-driven communication has played such an integral part in President-elect Trump's extraordinary win." As details emerged, it became clear that this was not mere bluster, but that this firm had managed to amass a trove of personal data about individuals, as the Washington Post suggested, up to 5000 pieces of data on each American citizen and then sought to nudge or manipulate voting behaviours by creating highly-targetted content, including ads on major social media platforms and so-called "fake news" stories. @@ -21,7 +23,7 @@ Whether this situation is deliberate as some scholars have suggested, or merely We hope you'll find this exercise illuminating, and will look forward to telling you about that monkey selfie in our next session. -# Exercise 1 +## Exercise 1 As we mentioned in the video, we'd like you to begin by reading the Terms and Conditions for Facebook. Before you begin read, write some notes on what you expect to find and how you think it will be structured. @@ -40,7 +42,7 @@ Taking the Facebook T&Cs document as an example for your own posting on various If you're participating in a course at Birmingham University, please share this reflection on the canvas forum and react in writing to what at least two other course participants have written. -# Exercise 2 - documentary analysis +## Exercise 2 - documentary analysis For your next exercise, we'd like to stick with the facebook theme and have you to conduct an informal study of a digital chat in an online forum. Facebook has a range of privacy settings for their groups ([you can read more about public, closed and secret fb groups here](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/understanding-public-closed-and-secret-facebook-groups) and [here](https://www.lifewire.com/facebook-groups-4103720)), but for this exercise, we'd like you to focus on one of the large public groups, for reasons which will become clear below. @@ -53,13 +55,15 @@ Write up a brief (but at least two paragraphs - 8-10 sentences) report. This sho Note: if you'd prefer to avoid using facebook. Here's an alternative approach: check out one of the major alternative chat platforms. We'd recommend you start with something like StackExchange and browse to their [directory of sites](https://stackexchange.com/sites#lifearts). Scroll through the Q&A and see if you can answer the questions as above. -# Exercise 3 - reading! +## Exercise 3 - reading! Based on what you've found provocative or interesting so far, spend some time reading further about the content we've discussed. There are a range of options we've highligted below. -# Reading: +## Recommended Readings: + +### Articles - Survey re: facebook users - https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win @@ -69,6 +73,6 @@ Based on what you've found provocative or interesting so far, spend some time re - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/reading-the-privacy-policies-you-encounter-in-a-year-would-take-76-work-days/253851/ - http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7350 -# Other media: +### Other media: - Film: ["Terms and Conditions May Apply"](http://tacma.net/) summarised in the [Huffington Post](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-weinstein/terms-and-conditions-may-_b_3692883.html) diff --git a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/03-Session2.md b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/03-Session2.md index d31da44..58a7661 100644 --- a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/03-Session2.md +++ b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/03-Session2.md @@ -1,8 +1,10 @@ # Copyright, licenses, and data as property? -iframe / video here +## Video -transcript below: +### iframe / video here + +### transcript below: Selfie monkey UK copyright talks about the author of a work being the person that creates the copyright work: the person that holds the pen or paintbrush the musician strumming the guitar. If the creator is employed or commissioned to produce the work their contract may say something different. Copyright applies to written text based works, images, music, film and various other media. It arises as soon as the content is create and does not require any registration, or expression of the right. It is just exists. diff --git a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/04-Session3.md b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/04-Session3.md index 8cc75e9..1e7a499 100644 --- a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/04-Session3.md +++ b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/04-Session3.md @@ -1,8 +1,10 @@ # Confidentiality, anonymity, consent, and privacy -iframe / video here +## Video -# Transcript of the video: +### iframe / video here + +### Transcript of the video: Data is used in a huge variety of ways, in fact, with the rise of digital platforms, social media, and big data, as we highlighted in our second session, few few aspects of our lives are "off limits". To be fair, it's not as if platforms like Google and Facebook have invented the idea of "data," for decades scholarly researchers have been collecting and analysing data in ways that they hope will improve the quality of life for countless individual people. @@ -37,7 +39,7 @@ This is a brave new digital world that we're working in, to be sure. And it can In the tasks for this session, we're going to have you do a deep dive into some of the studies we've mentioned briefly here and then to write up a brief reflection on what you'd like to make your own research design ethic. In the next session, we're going to wrap-up and try to explore some of the ways that we can move forward as researchers in the midst of these very complicated scenarios that we've shared with you so far. -# Resources: +### Resources: - "Genealogy Databases Enable Naming of Anonymous DNA Donors" http://science.sciencemag.org/content/339/6117/262 - The full technical report, "[Identifying Personal Genomes by Surname Inference](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/339/6117/321)" diff --git a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/can-you-use-stuff-online-for-research.html b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/can-you-use-stuff-online-for-research.html index f62c54a..5efcc43 100644 --- a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/can-you-use-stuff-online-for-research.html +++ b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/can-you-use-stuff-online-for-research.html @@ -68,23 +68,38 @@
  • 1 Introduction to the module
  • 2 Can you use stuff online for research?
  • 3 Exploring the world of user-generated data
    • +
  • 4 Copyright, licenses, and data as property?
    • +
  • 5 Confidentiality, anonymity, consent, and privacy
    • +
  • 6 Final Steps - How do we decide what to do?
  • Published with bookdown
    • @@ -108,11 +123,13 @@

    Chapter 2 Can you use stuff online for research?

    In this video, we discuss the overarching question that occupies this module. You can watch the video, and read the transcript below.

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    2.1 iframe / video here

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    2.1 Lecture

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    2.1.1 iframe / video here

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    2.2 Video Transcript:

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    2.1.2 Video Transcript:

    JK: In this module, we’d like to focus on a particular question:

    AF: “Can you use stuff online for research?”

    JK: This is one of those questions which might seem simple at first hearing, but if recent controversies are any indication, this is anything but the case.

    @@ -123,6 +140,7 @@

    AF: For each of our sessions, we’ll be looking at examples and case studies from recent events to explore how legal and ethical aspects intersect to influence research using digital content. We will talk about a ‘selfie monkey’ who raised some fundamental questions about the nature of copyright and ownership. We’ll explore the recent ‘Cambridge Analytica’ case and the sometimes unexpected (or unauthorised) uses social media data might get exposed to. We’ll also talk about the rise of “big data” and the problems surrounding “anonymous” data in this era of cloud computing.

    JK: We hope you’ll stick around for the whole module and work your way through the materials we’ve provided here. You’ll find that there is a bit of something for everyone, whether you’re completely new to the idea of research ethics, or if you’re an old hand and want to dig deeper into some of the complexities of the issues.

    +
    diff --git a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/confidentiality-anonymity-consent-and-privacy.html b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/confidentiality-anonymity-consent-and-privacy.html index b936290..ead0612 100644 --- a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/confidentiality-anonymity-consent-and-privacy.html +++ b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/confidentiality-anonymity-consent-and-privacy.html @@ -33,7 +33,7 @@ - + @@ -68,23 +68,38 @@
  • 1 Introduction to the module
  • 2 Can you use stuff online for research?
  • 3 Exploring the world of user-generated data
    • +
  • 4 Copyright, licenses, and data as property?
    • +
  • 5 Confidentiality, anonymity, consent, and privacy
    • +
  • 6 Final Steps - How do we decide what to do?
  • Published with bookdown
    • @@ -106,8 +121,45 @@
    @@ -115,7 +167,7 @@
    - + diff --git a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/copyright-licenses-and-data-as-property.html b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/copyright-licenses-and-data-as-property.html index 5bb3d51..b4cd953 100644 --- a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/copyright-licenses-and-data-as-property.html +++ b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/copyright-licenses-and-data-as-property.html @@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ - + @@ -68,23 +68,38 @@
  • 1 Introduction to the module
  • 2 Can you use stuff online for research?
  • 3 Exploring the world of user-generated data
    • +
  • 4 Copyright, licenses, and data as property?
    • +
  • 5 Confidentiality, anonymity, consent, and privacy
    • +
  • 6 Final Steps - How do we decide what to do?
  • Published with bookdown
    • @@ -106,9 +121,14 @@
    - + diff --git a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/exploring-the-world-of-user-generated-data.html b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/exploring-the-world-of-user-generated-data.html index e422ef8..7a09204 100644 --- a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/exploring-the-world-of-user-generated-data.html +++ b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/exploring-the-world-of-user-generated-data.html @@ -33,7 +33,7 @@ - + @@ -68,23 +68,38 @@
  • 1 Introduction to the module
  • 2 Can you use stuff online for research?
  • 3 Exploring the world of user-generated data
    • +
  • 4 Copyright, licenses, and data as property?
    • +
  • 5 Confidentiality, anonymity, consent, and privacy
    • +
  • 6 Final Steps - How do we decide what to do?
  • Published with bookdown
    • @@ -107,11 +122,13 @@

    Chapter 3 Exploring the world of user-generated data

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    3.1 Video

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    3.1 Lecture

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    3.1.1 Video

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    3.2 Transcript (Jeremy Kidwell speaking)

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    3.1.2 Transcript (Jeremy Kidwell speaking)

    You’ve probably heard by now of the company “Cambridge Analytica” recently renamed to Emerdata. As several media outlets reported in 2017, a little known firm called Cambridge analytica surprised many by claiming that their “evolutionary approach to data-driven communication has played such an integral part in President-elect Trump’s extraordinary win.” As details emerged, it became clear that this was not mere bluster, but that this firm had managed to amass a trove of personal data about individuals, as the Washington Post suggested, up to 5000 pieces of data on each American citizen and then sought to nudge or manipulate voting behaviours by creating highly-targetted content, including ads on major social media platforms and so-called “fake news” stories.

    Data ethics is always easier in hindsight, but I’d like to nonetheless look into the structure of this data collection to raise some issues about how data gets “out there” in the first place.

    Facebook is a central character in this story about data and this isn’t surprising given their dominance of internet communication in recent years. In some cases, more persons answering surveys claim to be using facebook than the internet. While this is logically impossible - facebook is merely a service which sits on top of the internet, at least for now – it gets towards the ubiquity of facebook use. Given this centrality, it is sensible to begin our look here to see how things are in terms of data. The story of privacy and data protection on facebook is, to be generous, an evolving one. Much of the data that users put on facebook was completely public until 2012, including the complete catalogue of your “likes”. For a company like Cambridge Analytica, this information was pure gold - enabling them to build up what psychologists call a “psychometric” profile using this data. If this information was on the internet in plain sight, could any user have assumed that their activity on facebook was private? Should they have? Since likes were made private, facebook has had a number of “gaffes” in which new features or bugs have forced this data back out into the public. Much of the reporting of the cambridge analytica scandal have referred to their access of data as a “breach” implying that Facebook had been trying to keep data that users generated private in good faith and that this company had found improper or possibly even illegal ways to harvest it, but this is actually quite misleading. Companies like CA – and it is worth noting that there are probably hundreds of other similar operations which have been harvesting similarly massive datasets - can put together millions of tiny pieces of tiny information scattered across the internet - the number of contacts you have on a social network platform, or the number of profile pictures you’ve cycled through, hint at personality traits.

    @@ -121,6 +138,55 @@

    Whether this situation is deliberate as some scholars have suggested, or merely an unforunate accident, there’s a problem here relating to user literacy of data policies. So we’re going to ask you to actually read through one of these documents and then to debrief how this knowledge changes your perspective on putting your data on social network platforms. We’re also going to ask you to do an informal study of a digital chat.

    We hope you’ll find this exercise illuminating, and will look forward to telling you about that monkey selfie in our next session.

    +
    +
    +

    3.2 Exercise 1

    +

    As we mentioned in the video, we’d like you to begin by reading the Terms and Conditions for Facebook. Before you begin read, write some notes on what you expect to find and how you think it will be structured.

    +

    Open the T&Cs for Facebook here: (https://www.facebook.com/terms)

    +

    When you’re finished, take a moment to reflect on your reactions to the T&Cs. Write at least two paragraphs summarising your experience of reading, what you found surprising, what you expected but didn’t find there, and generally what you took away from the experience of reading.

    +

    Now, read over one of the following summaries which have been writtn about Facebook’s T&C’s:

    + +

    It is worth noting: these two documents detail the terms and conditions in 2014-2015. A very important part of the story about online T&Cs, however, is that they are constantly changing (read more about this here).

    +

    Taking the Facebook T&Cs document as an example for your own posting on various online platforms (or imagining that you do) how does this knowledge change your perspective on putting your data on social network platforms?

    +

    If you’re participating in a course at Birmingham University, please share this reflection on the canvas forum and react in writing to what at least two other course participants have written.

    +
    +
    +

    3.3 Exercise 2 - documentary analysis

    +

    For your next exercise, we’d like to stick with the facebook theme and have you to conduct an informal study of a digital chat in an online forum. Facebook has a range of privacy settings for their groups (you can read more about public, closed and secret fb groups here and here), but for this exercise, we’d like you to focus on one of the large public groups, for reasons which will become clear below.

    +

    If you have a facebook account, and don’t mind using it (we will completely understand if you don’t or prefer not to - see below for more on this), navigate to the Facebook group directory: (https://www.facebook.com/groups/?category=discover). For this exercise, you need to avoid groups which are “closed” or “private” even if you’re already a member. Facebook does not have a feature which you can use to search for a public (as opposed to private or closed) group, so your best bet is to run a search for the term “public group”. Be careful, some groups may have chat with offensive content. Try to avoid groups which centre around sensitive topics. For this example, we ran a search for “public group” and in the list which came up, one was a group called “Tea & Empathy (PUBLIC GROUP)” which the description tells us is “… a national, informal, peer-to-peer support network aiming to foster a compassionate and supportive atmosphere throughout the NHS.” Search for a different group, but make sure it has at least 500 members, so that there will be an active chat for the exercise below.

    +

    Now, click on “discussion” on the bar to the left to filter just discussion postings. Spend an hour reading through the threads and taking some notes towards a documentary analysis. What types of information are people sharing in the group? Are there any persons contributing data to this group sharing personal information? Now that you have a level of understanding of the facebook T&Cs can you find any data here that a person might not want to post if they had the same level of understanding? Do you think that it would be ethical for a scholarly researcher or marketing consultant to make use of this data?

    +

    Write up a brief (but at least two paragraphs - 8-10 sentences) report. This should be strictly anonymised, i.e. don’t mention any specific users in your report. Imagine that you are a consultant who has been hired to detect user literacy about platform T&Cs. Summarise what you’ve found and your appraisal of the nature of this online chat.

    +

    Note: if you’d prefer to avoid using facebook. Here’s an alternative approach: check out one of the major alternative chat platforms. We’d recommend you start with something like StackExchange and browse to their directory of sites. Scroll through the Q&A and see if you can answer the questions as above.

    +
    +
    +

    3.4 Exercise 3 - reading!

    +

    Based on what you’ve found provocative or interesting so far, spend some time reading further about the content we’ve discussed. There are a range of options we’ve highligted below.

    +
    +
    @@ -128,7 +194,7 @@ - + diff --git a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/final-steps-how-do-we-decide-what-to-do.html b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/final-steps-how-do-we-decide-what-to-do.html index f44bcb2..0ee7ef1 100644 --- a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/final-steps-how-do-we-decide-what-to-do.html +++ b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/final-steps-how-do-we-decide-what-to-do.html @@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ - + @@ -68,23 +68,38 @@
  • 1 Introduction to the module
  • 2 Can you use stuff online for research?
  • 3 Exploring the world of user-generated data
    • +
  • 4 Copyright, licenses, and data as property?
    • +
  • 5 Confidentiality, anonymity, consent, and privacy
    • +
  • 6 Final Steps - How do we decide what to do?
  • Published with bookdown
    • @@ -106,7 +121,7 @@
    -

    Chapter 13 Final Steps - How do we decide what to do?

    +

    Chapter 6 Final Steps - How do we decide what to do?

    @@ -114,7 +129,7 @@ - + diff --git a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/index.html b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/index.html index 9ad833d..197c92c 100644 --- a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/index.html +++ b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/index.html @@ -68,23 +68,38 @@
  • 1 Introduction to the module
  • 2 Can you use stuff online for research?
  • 3 Exploring the world of user-generated data
    • +
  • 4 Copyright, licenses, and data as property?
    • +
  • 5 Confidentiality, anonymity, consent, and privacy
    • +
  • 6 Final Steps - How do we decide what to do?
  • Published with bookdown
    • diff --git a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/search_index.json b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/search_index.json index 1976e1b..45fec31 100644 --- a/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/search_index.json +++ b/static/files/bookdown/data_ethics-law_course/search_index.json @@ -1,15 +1,8 @@ [ ["index.html", "what can I do with stuff I find online? Chapter 1 Introduction to the module", " what can I do with stuff I find online? Alex Fenlon and Jeremy H. Kidwell 2016-12-02 Chapter 1 Introduction to the module This module has been designed to enable independent learners to aquire knowledge about contemporary legal and methodological issues surrounding digital data and research, and to provoke some thinking on the big questions that underpin some of the more practical issues we discuss here. Ideally, a student should expect to invest at least four hours in independent learning activities (reading articles, writing reflections, etc.) over the course of a week. It should be possible to work through this a bit more slowly and in-depth. We have tried to point to a range of resources, both those which are accessible and those which are challenging. It is also worth noting that this module is included in a broader effort underway at the University of Birmingham, the “Birmingham Digital” which has other modules working alongside this one. For the week, we have divided content into five parts. Included here (and below) is a brief introduction to the course. There are four additional sessions, which each have associated activities which explore more specific areas within the topic we are exploring here. Now let’s dive into the big issues together! We will explain more along the way as we go along together. "], -["can-you-use-stuff-online-for-research.html", "Chapter 2 Can you use stuff online for research? 2.1 iframe / video here 2.2 Video Transcript:", " Chapter 2 Can you use stuff online for research? In this video, we discuss the overarching question that occupies this module. You can watch the video, and read the transcript below. 2.1 iframe / video here 2.2 Video Transcript: JK: In this module, we’d like to focus on a particular question: AF: “Can you use stuff online for research?” JK: This is one of those questions which might seem simple at first hearing, but if recent controversies are any indication, this is anything but the case. AF: As we see it, the word “can” works out in two different ways - “can you use stuff” might be framed as a “legal” question… JK: Or as an “ethical” one. Lucky for you, I’m an ethicist and he’s a lawyer. So we’re going to try and combine our expertise as we think together on the issues that arise around digital data and research. AF: The legal issues get complicated pretty fast: do we have the legal right or ability to use content found online? What are the legal aspects around using online materials for research? Can we simply use it, do we need permission/ a licence from the platform/ website, from the publisher or from the author/ creator/ uploader of the content? What about the new data protection regime? What is our legal basis for processing personal data? Is the individual concerned aware of this? Do they need to be? JK: Of course, legal concerns overlap with ethical ones - the original lawyers (and some of the current ones) were philosophers after all. But there are some differen emphases when we consider this question from an ethical perspective… the word at the start of our question changes a bit, perhaps from “can” to “should we use content we find online”? The content may be ok from the legal aspect, it may be free from any copyright restrictions, but there may be ethical issues that arise in using the content or data for a research purposes. In subsequent sessions, we’ll be talking about the idea of informed consent and how it gets more complicated in the digital realm, especially with the rise of social media. AF: For each of our sessions, we’ll be looking at examples and case studies from recent events to explore how legal and ethical aspects intersect to influence research using digital content. We will talk about a ‘selfie monkey’ who raised some fundamental questions about the nature of copyright and ownership. We’ll explore the recent ‘Cambridge Analytica’ case and the sometimes unexpected (or unauthorised) uses social media data might get exposed to. We’ll also talk about the rise of “big data” and the problems surrounding “anonymous” data in this era of cloud computing. JK: We hope you’ll stick around for the whole module and work your way through the materials we’ve provided here. You’ll find that there is a bit of something for everyone, whether you’re completely new to the idea of research ethics, or if you’re an old hand and want to dig deeper into some of the complexities of the issues. "], -["exploring-the-world-of-user-generated-data.html", "Chapter 3 Exploring the world of user-generated data 3.1 Video 3.2 Transcript (Jeremy Kidwell speaking)", " Chapter 3 Exploring the world of user-generated data 3.1 Video 3.2 Transcript (Jeremy Kidwell speaking) You’ve probably heard by now of the company “Cambridge Analytica” recently renamed to Emerdata. As several media outlets reported in 2017, a little known firm called Cambridge analytica surprised many by claiming that their “evolutionary approach to data-driven communication has played such an integral part in President-elect Trump’s extraordinary win.” As details emerged, it became clear that this was not mere bluster, but that this firm had managed to amass a trove of personal data about individuals, as the Washington Post suggested, up to 5000 pieces of data on each American citizen and then sought to nudge or manipulate voting behaviours by creating highly-targetted content, including ads on major social media platforms and so-called “fake news” stories. Data ethics is always easier in hindsight, but I’d like to nonetheless look into the structure of this data collection to raise some issues about how data gets “out there” in the first place. Facebook is a central character in this story about data and this isn’t surprising given their dominance of internet communication in recent years. In some cases, more persons answering surveys claim to be using facebook than the internet. While this is logically impossible - facebook is merely a service which sits on top of the internet, at least for now – it gets towards the ubiquity of facebook use. Given this centrality, it is sensible to begin our look here to see how things are in terms of data. The story of privacy and data protection on facebook is, to be generous, an evolving one. Much of the data that users put on facebook was completely public until 2012, including the complete catalogue of your “likes”. For a company like Cambridge Analytica, this information was pure gold - enabling them to build up what psychologists call a “psychometric” profile using this data. If this information was on the internet in plain sight, could any user have assumed that their activity on facebook was private? Should they have? Since likes were made private, facebook has had a number of “gaffes” in which new features or bugs have forced this data back out into the public. Much of the reporting of the cambridge analytica scandal have referred to their access of data as a “breach” implying that Facebook had been trying to keep data that users generated private in good faith and that this company had found improper or possibly even illegal ways to harvest it, but this is actually quite misleading. Companies like CA – and it is worth noting that there are probably hundreds of other similar operations which have been harvesting similarly massive datasets - can put together millions of tiny pieces of tiny information scattered across the internet - the number of contacts you have on a social network platform, or the number of profile pictures you’ve cycled through, hint at personality traits. The controversial part that some persons are (in my opinion inaccurately) calling a breach relates to another approach that CA took on, shortly after facebook began to make its data privacy policies a bit less free-wheeling. They used Amazon’s mechanical turk platform, where companies can hire consultants to do tiny tasks for small sums of money, sometimes just a single pound (or dollar in this case) to answer a personality survey. Over 200k persons answered this survey, which had a hidden gem at the end - users were asked to share their facebook profiles, with their (now private) likes and friends. Thousands compiled unwittingly. Some people who took the survey complained to Amazon that this violated Amazon’s terms of service, but Amazon didn’t discontinue the surveys until more than a year later. Is this kind of data collection ethical? Well, I’ll get into these kinds of questions from the perspective of a researcher a bit later, after we hear about the monkey selfie. For now, I want us to start thinking about ourselves as generators of data. This is a good ethical exercise, to place ourselves in a situation and see how we feel - so that we turn this dynamic around and begin to think of ourselves as collectors (and not producers) of data, we have some sensitivity to how things might be a bit complex. For this session, we’d like to have you try a few exercises which will get you acquainted with the idea of “terms and conditions”. You’ve likely seen dozens of T&C’s as they’re called by now, but because they’re all in legalese and often dozens of pages long, we hardly ever read them. In fact, the Guardian reported in 2011 that less than 7% of Britons ever read T&C’s and that 1/10 would rather read the whole phone book. Another more recent study found that only 1 in 4 students take the time to read terms and conditions. Jonathan Obar at York University did a study which found that it would take the average user 40 minutes a day to actually read through privacy and T&C documents in which they’re implicated. Yep, that’s 40 minutes out of every single day. Whether this situation is deliberate as some scholars have suggested, or merely an unforunate accident, there’s a problem here relating to user literacy of data policies. So we’re going to ask you to actually read through one of these documents and then to debrief how this knowledge changes your perspective on putting your data on social network platforms. We’re also going to ask you to do an informal study of a digital chat. We hope you’ll find this exercise illuminating, and will look forward to telling you about that monkey selfie in our next session. "], -["exercise-1.html", "Chapter 4 Exercise 1", " Chapter 4 Exercise 1 As we mentioned in the video, we’d like you to begin by reading the Terms and Conditions for Facebook. Before you begin read, write some notes on what you expect to find and how you think it will be structured. Open the T&Cs for Facebook here: (https://www.facebook.com/terms) When you’re finished, take a moment to reflect on your reactions to the T&Cs. Write at least two paragraphs summarising your experience of reading, what you found surprising, what you expected but didn’t find there, and generally what you took away from the experience of reading. Now, read over one of the following summaries which have been writtn about Facebook’s T&C’s: Vice, “I Asked a Privacy Lawyer What Facebook’s New Terms and Conditions Will Mean for You” Huffington Post, “Didn’t Read Facebook’s Fine Print? Here’s Exactly What It Says” It is worth noting: these two documents detail the terms and conditions in 2014-2015. A very important part of the story about online T&Cs, however, is that they are constantly changing (read more about this here). Taking the Facebook T&Cs document as an example for your own posting on various online platforms (or imagining that you do) how does this knowledge change your perspective on putting your data on social network platforms? If you’re participating in a course at Birmingham University, please share this reflection on the canvas forum and react in writing to what at least two other course participants have written. "], -["exercise-2-documentary-analysis.html", "Chapter 5 Exercise 2 - documentary analysis", " Chapter 5 Exercise 2 - documentary analysis For your next exercise, we’d like to stick with the facebook theme and have you to conduct an informal study of a digital chat in an online forum. Facebook has a range of privacy settings for their groups (you can read more about public, closed and secret fb groups here and here), but for this exercise, we’d like you to focus on one of the large public groups, for reasons which will become clear below. If you have a facebook account, and don’t mind using it (we will completely understand if you don’t or prefer not to - see below for more on this), navigate to the Facebook group directory: (https://www.facebook.com/groups/?category=discover). For this exercise, you need to avoid groups which are “closed” or “private” even if you’re already a member. Facebook does not have a feature which you can use to search for a public (as opposed to private or closed) group, so your best bet is to run a search for the term “public group”. Be careful, some groups may have chat with offensive content. Try to avoid groups which centre around sensitive topics. For this example, we ran a search for “public group” and in the list which came up, one was a group called “Tea & Empathy (PUBLIC GROUP)” which the description tells us is “… a national, informal, peer-to-peer support network aiming to foster a compassionate and supportive atmosphere throughout the NHS.” Search for a different group, but make sure it has at least 500 members, so that there will be an active chat for the exercise below. Now, click on “discussion” on the bar to the left to filter just discussion postings. Spend an hour reading through the threads and taking some notes towards a documentary analysis. What types of information are people sharing in the group? Are there any persons contributing data to this group sharing personal information? Now that you have a level of understanding of the facebook T&Cs can you find any data here that a person might not want to post if they had the same level of understanding? Do you think that it would be ethical for a scholarly researcher or marketing consultant to make use of this data? Write up a brief (but at least two paragraphs - 8-10 sentences) report. This should be strictly anonymised, i.e. don’t mention any specific users in your report. Imagine that you are a consultant who has been hired to detect user literacy about platform T&Cs. Summarise what you’ve found and your appraisal of the nature of this online chat. Note: if you’d prefer to avoid using facebook. Here’s an alternative approach: check out one of the major alternative chat platforms. We’d recommend you start with something like StackExchange and browse to their directory of sites. Scroll through the Q&A and see if you can answer the questions as above. "], -["exercise-3-reading.html", "Chapter 6 Exercise 3 - reading!", " Chapter 6 Exercise 3 - reading! Based on what you’ve found provocative or interesting so far, spend some time reading further about the content we’ve discussed. There are a range of options we’ve highligted below. "], -["reading.html", "Chapter 7 Reading:", " Chapter 7 Reading: Survey re: facebook users https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election https://www.fastcompany.com/40550423/how-facebook-blew-it https://www.npr.org/2016/08/23/491024846/do-you-read-terms-of-service-contracts-not-many-do-research-shows https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/reading-the-privacy-policies-you-encounter-in-a-year-would-take-76-work-days/253851/ http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7350 "], -["other-media.html", "Chapter 8 Other media:", " Chapter 8 Other media: Film: “Terms and Conditions May Apply” summarised in the Huffington Post "], -["copyright-licenses-and-data-as-property.html", "Chapter 9 Copyright, licenses, and data as property?", " Chapter 9 Copyright, licenses, and data as property? iframe / video here transcript below: Selfie monkey UK copyright talks about the author of a work being the person that creates the copyright work: the person that holds the pen or paintbrush the musician strumming the guitar. If the creator is employed or commissioned to produce the work their contract may say something different. Copyright applies to written text based works, images, music, film and various other media. It arises as soon as the content is create and does not require any registration, or expression of the right. It is just exists. Copyright applies equally in the physical and digital world and typical lasts for 70 years after the death of the author. Copyright in a journal article is the same in the print and the e version. Webpages and content found online then is subject to the usual copyright rules. It requires no registration and it doesn’t matter if something has the copyright symbol on it or- it is copyright protected. If it has copyright then, someone owns it. If someone owns copyright, that gives them the right to control who has access to it as well as if and how they can use it. Just because something is online and open for access, it does not necessarily mean that it is free to be used. Public domain in the openly available, in the ‘out there’ sense does not mean it is Public Domain, that is free from any rights. Copyright does allow some uses without the permission or consent of the author or owner. What this means is that although the owner can control who accesses and uses their work, the public can still use it in certain limited situations. These permitted acts include non-commercial research, and criticism and review. More details on these exceptions in a research context are provided in the articles complementing this section. Some of you may have heard of a photographer name David Slater who spent some time in the jungles of Indonesia. He found a troupe of Crested Black Macaques and started taking pictures. Such is their nature that they were curious and started to explore the equipment and ended up taking lots and lots of images. (insert Monkey selfie image & reference) I’m sure you’ll agree that the photo is fantastic and David thought so to. When he got home began emailing publishers and newspapers and eventually in was published in the UK press- that’s when the trouble started. The image was picked up by other blogs and newspapers and eventually by Wikipedia who used it on their definition of the species , . (Interestingly Wikipedia also now has a page on the dispute itself .) David complained claiming his copyright and licensing fees over the image. Is he right? Who owns the copyright? The photographer or the macaque? These are questions that have rumbled on since 2011 when David first released the image and subsequently when Wikipedia used the image. They found themselves at the heart of a public debate on to mainstream media when PETA sued David on behalf of the Macaque claiming the copyright on their behalf. Even Mock the Week the week got in on the action . While the copyright debate continues to puzzle the season Intellectual Property professionals and international media alike , David himself says the financial and personal cost to him has been huge. Speaking in July 2017 David was unable to represent himself in the PETA case and is struggling financially, despite the image being internationally famous. Regardless of the copyright aspect, we need to be aware that our actions can impact on the livelihood of individuals and their dependents. What this all means then that copyright in the digital world is a complex but important part of research literacy. Researchers and professionals should factor in copyright as important element when considering what you content might use in a research context. We can see that copyright is not the only or most important consideration, despite what I might think. It should be balanced with other components of the research activity. We’d now like to you go through a couple of exercises looking at copyright in the digital world. Look back at the Facebook terms think about who owns data you post on Facebook? What permission does Facebook have to use your content? Your pictures? Were you aware of this? Following that we’ll get you to look at copyright licences and consider how you might license your content, if you were a copyright owner. We’ll also get you to explore the nuance of the Monkey Selfie in some more detail. "], -["confidentiality-anonymity-consent-and-privacy.html", "Chapter 10 Confidentiality, anonymity, consent, and privacy", " Chapter 10 Confidentiality, anonymity, consent, and privacy iframe / video here "], -["transcript-of-the-video.html", "Chapter 11 Transcript of the video:", " Chapter 11 Transcript of the video: Data is used in a huge variety of ways, in fact, with the rise of digital platforms, social media, and big data, as we highlighted in our second session, few few aspects of our lives are “off limits”. To be fair, it’s not as if platforms like Google and Facebook have invented the idea of “data,” for decades scholarly researchers have been collecting and analysing data in ways that they hope will improve the quality of life for countless individual people. Let me give you one example of what I see as a benevolent kind of data collection. In recent years, DNA sequencing has become incredibly fast, efficient, and also inexpensive. Many issues with human health and disease have genetic components, and access to information about a range of human genomes can really help researchers to accelerate the pace of research and look for new areas of impact. Though there are some movements encouraging people to share personal genetic data openly (especially given the way some of these genomic databases are privatised and expensive to access) there are expectedly rare. Instead, in most cases people who contribute their personal genomic data to research do so on the expectation that their contributions will be made confidential or anonymous. I’m sure that some of you will already be aware of research concepts like confidentiality, but it’s helpful to pause and highlight what are three fundamental aspects of empirical research before we continue this discussion. The first “core concept” in research ethics is Informed consent: Regardless of privacy concerns, it is a fundamental right of any person participating in research that they consent to participation in a given study. Though we may imagine that consent can be implied sometimes, our ability to “read” people simply isn’t that trustworthy. Consent cannot be assumed. This means that research subjects must be informed of the study, how it will work, and what the data will be used for - and then given the opportunity to choose whether to participate or not. The research arm of Facebook conducted a study in 2012, the results of which were published in the journal PNAS. For a brief period, they deliberately skewed the news for 689,003 people to emphasise either positive emotional content or negative emotional content. Researchers wanted to see if this had an impact on the way users used the platform. What they found was not surprising, it did have an impact. What did surprise this research team was the outcry by a wide range of academic researchers suggesting (rightly) that they had not observed the principle of informed consent. You can read the eventual expression of “editorial concern” by PNAS editors to see their repentance for publishing this article. Informed consent isn’t the whole picture, however. In many cases, as I’ve already suggested above, users might not be willing to participate in a study if their resposes were to be made public. So, one of the fundamental ways that researchers approach data ethics is to remove personally identifiable data. In some cases, identities are known to researchers but made confidential, such that the readers of research publication cannot identify individual persons. In other stricter cases, research subjects are anonymised, so that even researchers in their notes do not preserve the specific identity of the people contributing data. They are just “subject 1” “subject 2” and so on. [lower thirds information with key terms here in videography] In 2013 a team of scientists from MIT released a study with shocking results. Through some clever data analysis techniques, they had found a way to de-anonmise a major genomic database. You can read more about this later. There have also been subsequent studies by other research teams de-anonymising other anonymised research databases. Much like cambridge analytica, these researchers gathered together millions of small fragments of data together and then tested for compatibility against these databases. In the case of the work by this team at MIT, they were able to de-anonymise 50 out of 1000 subjects in that study. In other cases the rate has been much worse. So what does this mean for research ethics? Simply put, in this new internet age, we can just use “subject 1” and “subject 2”. Our computers are powerful enough, and our lives public enough that clever people can reverse engineer them. There are two possible ways to respond to this new context for digital data. First, researchers can try to lock down their data sets, ensuring that they are stored in secure digital repositories. What makes a digital repository secure? A whole lot of things - good passwords (and not ones which need to be changed every six months), strong and consistent network security and data privacy policies, clear ways to classify the levels of sensitivity of a given data-set, well-trained staff… etc. I’ve included some articles you can read here if you want to learn a bit more about how to set up a proper data vault. But as the range of high-profile hacks in recent years indicate, organisations very rarely check all these boxes, and so even secured data can be at risk of breach. This continued risk has led some researchers to take up another option, to pursue alternative research methods which do not emphasise privacy and confidentiality, but rather active participation by research subjects. To be fair, this will only work in certain contexts, definitely not in the context of highly sensitive data or in studies conducted with vulnerable people. But many researchers are having innovative and surprising results with participatory studies. We can involve research subjects in the design of a study, enable them to help us interpret the results, and make their voices known. The advantage here is that a study turns from a faceless mass into a specific group of unique people. This is a brave new digital world that we’re working in, to be sure. And it can be easy to ignore the risks associated with data generation and use in our excitement for new research and horizons to be explored. Research is fun, exciting, and often empowering. I like to say that the task of a researcher is to help people tell their stories. We need to be sure that we do this in a way that empowers those individuals and not just ourselves. And this means that we need to make responsible choices about research design and data management. In the tasks for this session, we’re going to have you do a deep dive into some of the studies we’ve mentioned briefly here and then to write up a brief reflection on what you’d like to make your own research design ethic. In the next session, we’re going to wrap-up and try to explore some of the ways that we can move forward as researchers in the midst of these very complicated scenarios that we’ve shared with you so far. "], -["resources.html", "Chapter 12 Resources:", " Chapter 12 Resources: “Genealogy Databases Enable Naming of Anonymous DNA Donors” http://science.sciencemag.org/content/339/6117/262 The full technical report, “Identifying Personal Genomes by Surname Inference” http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/24/8788.full.pdf PNAS Editorial expression of concern: https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/regulations/common-rule/index.html "], -["final-steps-how-do-we-decide-what-to-do.html", "Chapter 13 Final Steps - How do we decide what to do?", " Chapter 13 Final Steps - How do we decide what to do? "] +["can-you-use-stuff-online-for-research.html", "Chapter 2 Can you use stuff online for research? 2.1 Lecture", " Chapter 2 Can you use stuff online for research? In this video, we discuss the overarching question that occupies this module. You can watch the video, and read the transcript below. 2.1 Lecture 2.1.1 iframe / video here 2.1.2 Video Transcript: JK: In this module, we’d like to focus on a particular question: AF: “Can you use stuff online for research?” JK: This is one of those questions which might seem simple at first hearing, but if recent controversies are any indication, this is anything but the case. AF: As we see it, the word “can” works out in two different ways - “can you use stuff” might be framed as a “legal” question… JK: Or as an “ethical” one. Lucky for you, I’m an ethicist and he’s a lawyer. So we’re going to try and combine our expertise as we think together on the issues that arise around digital data and research. AF: The legal issues get complicated pretty fast: do we have the legal right or ability to use content found online? What are the legal aspects around using online materials for research? Can we simply use it, do we need permission/ a licence from the platform/ website, from the publisher or from the author/ creator/ uploader of the content? What about the new data protection regime? What is our legal basis for processing personal data? Is the individual concerned aware of this? Do they need to be? JK: Of course, legal concerns overlap with ethical ones - the original lawyers (and some of the current ones) were philosophers after all. But there are some differen emphases when we consider this question from an ethical perspective… the word at the start of our question changes a bit, perhaps from “can” to “should we use content we find online”? The content may be ok from the legal aspect, it may be free from any copyright restrictions, but there may be ethical issues that arise in using the content or data for a research purposes. In subsequent sessions, we’ll be talking about the idea of informed consent and how it gets more complicated in the digital realm, especially with the rise of social media. AF: For each of our sessions, we’ll be looking at examples and case studies from recent events to explore how legal and ethical aspects intersect to influence research using digital content. We will talk about a ‘selfie monkey’ who raised some fundamental questions about the nature of copyright and ownership. We’ll explore the recent ‘Cambridge Analytica’ case and the sometimes unexpected (or unauthorised) uses social media data might get exposed to. We’ll also talk about the rise of “big data” and the problems surrounding “anonymous” data in this era of cloud computing. JK: We hope you’ll stick around for the whole module and work your way through the materials we’ve provided here. You’ll find that there is a bit of something for everyone, whether you’re completely new to the idea of research ethics, or if you’re an old hand and want to dig deeper into some of the complexities of the issues. "], +["exploring-the-world-of-user-generated-data.html", "Chapter 3 Exploring the world of user-generated data 3.1 Lecture 3.2 Exercise 1 3.3 Exercise 2 - documentary analysis 3.4 Exercise 3 - reading! 3.5 Recommended Readings:", " Chapter 3 Exploring the world of user-generated data 3.1 Lecture 3.1.1 Video 3.1.2 Transcript (Jeremy Kidwell speaking) You’ve probably heard by now of the company “Cambridge Analytica” recently renamed to Emerdata. As several media outlets reported in 2017, a little known firm called Cambridge analytica surprised many by claiming that their “evolutionary approach to data-driven communication has played such an integral part in President-elect Trump’s extraordinary win.” As details emerged, it became clear that this was not mere bluster, but that this firm had managed to amass a trove of personal data about individuals, as the Washington Post suggested, up to 5000 pieces of data on each American citizen and then sought to nudge or manipulate voting behaviours by creating highly-targetted content, including ads on major social media platforms and so-called “fake news” stories. Data ethics is always easier in hindsight, but I’d like to nonetheless look into the structure of this data collection to raise some issues about how data gets “out there” in the first place. Facebook is a central character in this story about data and this isn’t surprising given their dominance of internet communication in recent years. In some cases, more persons answering surveys claim to be using facebook than the internet. While this is logically impossible - facebook is merely a service which sits on top of the internet, at least for now – it gets towards the ubiquity of facebook use. Given this centrality, it is sensible to begin our look here to see how things are in terms of data. The story of privacy and data protection on facebook is, to be generous, an evolving one. Much of the data that users put on facebook was completely public until 2012, including the complete catalogue of your “likes”. For a company like Cambridge Analytica, this information was pure gold - enabling them to build up what psychologists call a “psychometric” profile using this data. If this information was on the internet in plain sight, could any user have assumed that their activity on facebook was private? Should they have? Since likes were made private, facebook has had a number of “gaffes” in which new features or bugs have forced this data back out into the public. Much of the reporting of the cambridge analytica scandal have referred to their access of data as a “breach” implying that Facebook had been trying to keep data that users generated private in good faith and that this company had found improper or possibly even illegal ways to harvest it, but this is actually quite misleading. Companies like CA – and it is worth noting that there are probably hundreds of other similar operations which have been harvesting similarly massive datasets - can put together millions of tiny pieces of tiny information scattered across the internet - the number of contacts you have on a social network platform, or the number of profile pictures you’ve cycled through, hint at personality traits. The controversial part that some persons are (in my opinion inaccurately) calling a breach relates to another approach that CA took on, shortly after facebook began to make its data privacy policies a bit less free-wheeling. They used Amazon’s mechanical turk platform, where companies can hire consultants to do tiny tasks for small sums of money, sometimes just a single pound (or dollar in this case) to answer a personality survey. Over 200k persons answered this survey, which had a hidden gem at the end - users were asked to share their facebook profiles, with their (now private) likes and friends. Thousands compiled unwittingly. Some people who took the survey complained to Amazon that this violated Amazon’s terms of service, but Amazon didn’t discontinue the surveys until more than a year later. Is this kind of data collection ethical? Well, I’ll get into these kinds of questions from the perspective of a researcher a bit later, after we hear about the monkey selfie. For now, I want us to start thinking about ourselves as generators of data. This is a good ethical exercise, to place ourselves in a situation and see how we feel - so that we turn this dynamic around and begin to think of ourselves as collectors (and not producers) of data, we have some sensitivity to how things might be a bit complex. For this session, we’d like to have you try a few exercises which will get you acquainted with the idea of “terms and conditions”. You’ve likely seen dozens of T&C’s as they’re called by now, but because they’re all in legalese and often dozens of pages long, we hardly ever read them. In fact, the Guardian reported in 2011 that less than 7% of Britons ever read T&C’s and that 1/10 would rather read the whole phone book. Another more recent study found that only 1 in 4 students take the time to read terms and conditions. Jonathan Obar at York University did a study which found that it would take the average user 40 minutes a day to actually read through privacy and T&C documents in which they’re implicated. Yep, that’s 40 minutes out of every single day. Whether this situation is deliberate as some scholars have suggested, or merely an unforunate accident, there’s a problem here relating to user literacy of data policies. So we’re going to ask you to actually read through one of these documents and then to debrief how this knowledge changes your perspective on putting your data on social network platforms. We’re also going to ask you to do an informal study of a digital chat. We hope you’ll find this exercise illuminating, and will look forward to telling you about that monkey selfie in our next session. 3.2 Exercise 1 As we mentioned in the video, we’d like you to begin by reading the Terms and Conditions for Facebook. Before you begin read, write some notes on what you expect to find and how you think it will be structured. Open the T&Cs for Facebook here: (https://www.facebook.com/terms) When you’re finished, take a moment to reflect on your reactions to the T&Cs. Write at least two paragraphs summarising your experience of reading, what you found surprising, what you expected but didn’t find there, and generally what you took away from the experience of reading. Now, read over one of the following summaries which have been writtn about Facebook’s T&C’s: Vice, “I Asked a Privacy Lawyer What Facebook’s New Terms and Conditions Will Mean for You” Huffington Post, “Didn’t Read Facebook’s Fine Print? Here’s Exactly What It Says” It is worth noting: these two documents detail the terms and conditions in 2014-2015. A very important part of the story about online T&Cs, however, is that they are constantly changing (read more about this here). Taking the Facebook T&Cs document as an example for your own posting on various online platforms (or imagining that you do) how does this knowledge change your perspective on putting your data on social network platforms? If you’re participating in a course at Birmingham University, please share this reflection on the canvas forum and react in writing to what at least two other course participants have written. 3.3 Exercise 2 - documentary analysis For your next exercise, we’d like to stick with the facebook theme and have you to conduct an informal study of a digital chat in an online forum. Facebook has a range of privacy settings for their groups (you can read more about public, closed and secret fb groups here and here), but for this exercise, we’d like you to focus on one of the large public groups, for reasons which will become clear below. If you have a facebook account, and don’t mind using it (we will completely understand if you don’t or prefer not to - see below for more on this), navigate to the Facebook group directory: (https://www.facebook.com/groups/?category=discover). For this exercise, you need to avoid groups which are “closed” or “private” even if you’re already a member. Facebook does not have a feature which you can use to search for a public (as opposed to private or closed) group, so your best bet is to run a search for the term “public group”. Be careful, some groups may have chat with offensive content. Try to avoid groups which centre around sensitive topics. For this example, we ran a search for “public group” and in the list which came up, one was a group called “Tea & Empathy (PUBLIC GROUP)” which the description tells us is “… a national, informal, peer-to-peer support network aiming to foster a compassionate and supportive atmosphere throughout the NHS.” Search for a different group, but make sure it has at least 500 members, so that there will be an active chat for the exercise below. Now, click on “discussion” on the bar to the left to filter just discussion postings. Spend an hour reading through the threads and taking some notes towards a documentary analysis. What types of information are people sharing in the group? Are there any persons contributing data to this group sharing personal information? Now that you have a level of understanding of the facebook T&Cs can you find any data here that a person might not want to post if they had the same level of understanding? Do you think that it would be ethical for a scholarly researcher or marketing consultant to make use of this data? Write up a brief (but at least two paragraphs - 8-10 sentences) report. This should be strictly anonymised, i.e. don’t mention any specific users in your report. Imagine that you are a consultant who has been hired to detect user literacy about platform T&Cs. Summarise what you’ve found and your appraisal of the nature of this online chat. Note: if you’d prefer to avoid using facebook. Here’s an alternative approach: check out one of the major alternative chat platforms. We’d recommend you start with something like StackExchange and browse to their directory of sites. Scroll through the Q&A and see if you can answer the questions as above. 3.4 Exercise 3 - reading! Based on what you’ve found provocative or interesting so far, spend some time reading further about the content we’ve discussed. There are a range of options we’ve highligted below. 3.5 Recommended Readings: 3.5.1 Articles Survey re: facebook users https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election https://www.fastcompany.com/40550423/how-facebook-blew-it https://www.npr.org/2016/08/23/491024846/do-you-read-terms-of-service-contracts-not-many-do-research-shows https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/reading-the-privacy-policies-you-encounter-in-a-year-would-take-76-work-days/253851/ http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7350 3.5.2 Other media: Film: “Terms and Conditions May Apply” summarised in the Huffington Post "], +["copyright-licenses-and-data-as-property.html", "Chapter 4 Copyright, licenses, and data as property? 4.1 Video", " Chapter 4 Copyright, licenses, and data as property? 4.1 Video 4.1.1 iframe / video here 4.1.2 transcript below: Selfie monkey UK copyright talks about the author of a work being the person that creates the copyright work: the person that holds the pen or paintbrush the musician strumming the guitar. If the creator is employed or commissioned to produce the work their contract may say something different. Copyright applies to written text based works, images, music, film and various other media. It arises as soon as the content is create and does not require any registration, or expression of the right. It is just exists. Copyright applies equally in the physical and digital world and typical lasts for 70 years after the death of the author. Copyright in a journal article is the same in the print and the e version. Webpages and content found online then is subject to the usual copyright rules. It requires no registration and it doesn’t matter if something has the copyright symbol on it or- it is copyright protected. If it has copyright then, someone owns it. If someone owns copyright, that gives them the right to control who has access to it as well as if and how they can use it. Just because something is online and open for access, it does not necessarily mean that it is free to be used. Public domain in the openly available, in the ‘out there’ sense does not mean it is Public Domain, that is free from any rights. Copyright does allow some uses without the permission or consent of the author or owner. What this means is that although the owner can control who accesses and uses their work, the public can still use it in certain limited situations. These permitted acts include non-commercial research, and criticism and review. More details on these exceptions in a research context are provided in the articles complementing this section. Some of you may have heard of a photographer name David Slater who spent some time in the jungles of Indonesia. He found a troupe of Crested Black Macaques and started taking pictures. Such is their nature that they were curious and started to explore the equipment and ended up taking lots and lots of images. (insert Monkey selfie image & reference) I’m sure you’ll agree that the photo is fantastic and David thought so to. When he got home began emailing publishers and newspapers and eventually in was published in the UK press- that’s when the trouble started. The image was picked up by other blogs and newspapers and eventually by Wikipedia who used it on their definition of the species , . (Interestingly Wikipedia also now has a page on the dispute itself .) David complained claiming his copyright and licensing fees over the image. Is he right? Who owns the copyright? The photographer or the macaque? These are questions that have rumbled on since 2011 when David first released the image and subsequently when Wikipedia used the image. They found themselves at the heart of a public debate on to mainstream media when PETA sued David on behalf of the Macaque claiming the copyright on their behalf. Even Mock the Week the week got in on the action . While the copyright debate continues to puzzle the season Intellectual Property professionals and international media alike , David himself says the financial and personal cost to him has been huge. Speaking in July 2017 David was unable to represent himself in the PETA case and is struggling financially, despite the image being internationally famous. Regardless of the copyright aspect, we need to be aware that our actions can impact on the livelihood of individuals and their dependents. What this all means then that copyright in the digital world is a complex but important part of research literacy. Researchers and professionals should factor in copyright as important element when considering what you content might use in a research context. We can see that copyright is not the only or most important consideration, despite what I might think. It should be balanced with other components of the research activity. We’d now like to you go through a couple of exercises looking at copyright in the digital world. Look back at the Facebook terms think about who owns data you post on Facebook? What permission does Facebook have to use your content? Your pictures? Were you aware of this? Following that we’ll get you to look at copyright licences and consider how you might license your content, if you were a copyright owner. We’ll also get you to explore the nuance of the Monkey Selfie in some more detail. "], +["confidentiality-anonymity-consent-and-privacy.html", "Chapter 5 Confidentiality, anonymity, consent, and privacy 5.1 Video", " Chapter 5 Confidentiality, anonymity, consent, and privacy 5.1 Video 5.1.1 iframe / video here 5.1.2 Transcript of the video: Data is used in a huge variety of ways, in fact, with the rise of digital platforms, social media, and big data, as we highlighted in our second session, few few aspects of our lives are “off limits”. To be fair, it’s not as if platforms like Google and Facebook have invented the idea of “data,” for decades scholarly researchers have been collecting and analysing data in ways that they hope will improve the quality of life for countless individual people. Let me give you one example of what I see as a benevolent kind of data collection. In recent years, DNA sequencing has become incredibly fast, efficient, and also inexpensive. Many issues with human health and disease have genetic components, and access to information about a range of human genomes can really help researchers to accelerate the pace of research and look for new areas of impact. Though there are some movements encouraging people to share personal genetic data openly (especially given the way some of these genomic databases are privatised and expensive to access) there are expectedly rare. Instead, in most cases people who contribute their personal genomic data to research do so on the expectation that their contributions will be made confidential or anonymous. I’m sure that some of you will already be aware of research concepts like confidentiality, but it’s helpful to pause and highlight what are three fundamental aspects of empirical research before we continue this discussion. The first “core concept” in research ethics is Informed consent: Regardless of privacy concerns, it is a fundamental right of any person participating in research that they consent to participation in a given study. Though we may imagine that consent can be implied sometimes, our ability to “read” people simply isn’t that trustworthy. Consent cannot be assumed. This means that research subjects must be informed of the study, how it will work, and what the data will be used for - and then given the opportunity to choose whether to participate or not. The research arm of Facebook conducted a study in 2012, the results of which were published in the journal PNAS. For a brief period, they deliberately skewed the news for 689,003 people to emphasise either positive emotional content or negative emotional content. Researchers wanted to see if this had an impact on the way users used the platform. What they found was not surprising, it did have an impact. What did surprise this research team was the outcry by a wide range of academic researchers suggesting (rightly) that they had not observed the principle of informed consent. You can read the eventual expression of “editorial concern” by PNAS editors to see their repentance for publishing this article. Informed consent isn’t the whole picture, however. In many cases, as I’ve already suggested above, users might not be willing to participate in a study if their resposes were to be made public. So, one of the fundamental ways that researchers approach data ethics is to remove personally identifiable data. In some cases, identities are known to researchers but made confidential, such that the readers of research publication cannot identify individual persons. In other stricter cases, research subjects are anonymised, so that even researchers in their notes do not preserve the specific identity of the people contributing data. They are just “subject 1” “subject 2” and so on. [lower thirds information with key terms here in videography] In 2013 a team of scientists from MIT released a study with shocking results. Through some clever data analysis techniques, they had found a way to de-anonmise a major genomic database. You can read more about this later. There have also been subsequent studies by other research teams de-anonymising other anonymised research databases. Much like cambridge analytica, these researchers gathered together millions of small fragments of data together and then tested for compatibility against these databases. In the case of the work by this team at MIT, they were able to de-anonymise 50 out of 1000 subjects in that study. In other cases the rate has been much worse. So what does this mean for research ethics? Simply put, in this new internet age, we can just use “subject 1” and “subject 2”. Our computers are powerful enough, and our lives public enough that clever people can reverse engineer them. There are two possible ways to respond to this new context for digital data. First, researchers can try to lock down their data sets, ensuring that they are stored in secure digital repositories. What makes a digital repository secure? A whole lot of things - good passwords (and not ones which need to be changed every six months), strong and consistent network security and data privacy policies, clear ways to classify the levels of sensitivity of a given data-set, well-trained staff… etc. I’ve included some articles you can read here if you want to learn a bit more about how to set up a proper data vault. But as the range of high-profile hacks in recent years indicate, organisations very rarely check all these boxes, and so even secured data can be at risk of breach. This continued risk has led some researchers to take up another option, to pursue alternative research methods which do not emphasise privacy and confidentiality, but rather active participation by research subjects. To be fair, this will only work in certain contexts, definitely not in the context of highly sensitive data or in studies conducted with vulnerable people. But many researchers are having innovative and surprising results with participatory studies. We can involve research subjects in the design of a study, enable them to help us interpret the results, and make their voices known. The advantage here is that a study turns from a faceless mass into a specific group of unique people. This is a brave new digital world that we’re working in, to be sure. And it can be easy to ignore the risks associated with data generation and use in our excitement for new research and horizons to be explored. Research is fun, exciting, and often empowering. I like to say that the task of a researcher is to help people tell their stories. We need to be sure that we do this in a way that empowers those individuals and not just ourselves. And this means that we need to make responsible choices about research design and data management. In the tasks for this session, we’re going to have you do a deep dive into some of the studies we’ve mentioned briefly here and then to write up a brief reflection on what you’d like to make your own research design ethic. In the next session, we’re going to wrap-up and try to explore some of the ways that we can move forward as researchers in the midst of these very complicated scenarios that we’ve shared with you so far. 5.1.3 Resources: “Genealogy Databases Enable Naming of Anonymous DNA Donors” http://science.sciencemag.org/content/339/6117/262 The full technical report, “Identifying Personal Genomes by Surname Inference” http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/24/8788.full.pdf PNAS Editorial expression of concern: https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/regulations/common-rule/index.html "], +["final-steps-how-do-we-decide-what-to-do.html", "Chapter 6 Final Steps - How do we decide what to do?", " Chapter 6 Final Steps - How do we decide what to do? "] ]