Access 2016

The Snowden revelations have shown us that big data about us is being gathered and used for surveillance, but what about the data gathered or digitized by researchers? Are big digital humanities projects not a form of cultural surveillance? Clearly we need to rethink the archiving of large amounts of data for research purposes in light of the unforeseen uses such data can be put to. This is especially true as capture technologies allow people to accession data right into open archival systems without much thought or curation. In this presentation I will discuss the ethics of digitization. I will do this by first confronting the common assumption that “information wants to be free” – that more data is good. Instead I will suggest that we can draw on the ethics of care to imagine how projects can think through the ethics of what they are gathering and who it will affect. I will use as an example a project that has been gathering tweets about game culture.