Thomas Padilla
Deputy Director, Archiving and Data Services
Internet Archive
Rachael Samberg
Scholarly Communication Officer and Program Director
University of California, Berkeley
This session will identify and explain the key legal and ethical issues that challenge US digital humanities (DH) practitioners engaging in “cross-border” text data mining (TDM) research. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded project Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining – Cross-Border (LLTDM-X) builds upon the previous NEH-sponsored institute, Building Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining (Building LLTDM), which provided guidance and strategies to DH TDM researchers on navigating legal literacies for text data mining (including copyright, contracts, privacy, and ethics) within a US context. A common challenge highlighted during Building LLTDM was the fact that US TDM practitioners encounter expanding and increasingly complex cross-border legal problems when: (i) the materials they want to mine are housed in a foreign jurisdiction, or are otherwise subject to foreign database licensing or laws; (ii) the human subjects they are studying or who created the underlying content reside in another country; or, (iii) the colleagues with whom they are collaborating reside abroad, yielding uncertainty about which country’s laws, agreements, and policies apply. LLTDM-X was designed to better understand the cross-border issues that DH TDM practitioners face, with the aim of using them to inform prospective research and education. The session will include a briefing about round tables held in 2023 with cross-border TDM practitioners and law and ethics experts from six countries, including session takeaways. It will also include the case study we developed to serve as initial education for TDM practitioners on these issues. The session will conclude with a discussion of the broader efforts needed to integrate LLTDM literacies into library services and DH curricula to reduce barriers to domestic and cross-border DH TDM research.
https://buildinglltdm.org/lltdmx/
https://buildinglltdm.org/