Don't Take the Data and Run

Host Kirsten Martin is joined by Katie Shilton, an associate professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she leads the Ethics and Values in Design (EViD) Lab. Her research focuses on ethics and policy for the design of information technologies, systems, and collections, and she is a co-principal investigator of the PERVADE project, a multi-campus collaboration focused on big data research ethics funded by the National Science Foundation. Katie came on the show to talk about a paper she recently coauthored with the members of the PERVADE team titled “Excavating awareness and power in data science: A manifesto for trustworthy pervasive data research,” which appeared in Big Data & Society. PERVADE was created to tackle unanswered empirical questions facing researchers working with big data—such as that gathered from social media platforms—and this paper in particular was a first attempt at making recommendations based on input from three main stakeholder groups: the researchers themselves, institutional review boards (IRBs) and other regulators, and social media users. Katie and Kirsten talked about how the ethical challenges of working with big data aren’t actually due to its bigness; rather, they arise because of how pervasive data collection has become. Katie explained how the traditional lab-based model for conducting ethical research doesn’t translate well to the big data space, discussing what researchers might instead learn from anthropologists, specifically ethnographers. Kirsten then brought up the applicability of this mindset not only in academia but also in corporate research environments. Oh, and if you listen closely, you’ll catch a cameo from one of Kirsten’s dogs who was determined to play tug during the interview.